


lemniscate

by AdiAbieu



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-08-19 09:06:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20207215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdiAbieu/pseuds/AdiAbieu
Summary: An hourglass is a paradox. It holds an exact amount of sand, and therefore a finite amount of time, and yet it can go on forever and ever with a simple reset.What does it mean to have a limited amount of time and have forever all at once?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi :) Sorry it's been so long. This is my attempt at a soulmate au.

An hourglass is a paradox. It holds an exact amount of sand, and therefore a finite amount of time, and yet it can go on forever and ever with a simple reset. 

What does it mean to have a limited amount of time and have forever all at once?

It’s a question she has struggled to be able to answer, even with something as paramount as this.

She has never had an issue with presentations. Not in front of her sniggering peers in high school, nor in front of her college competition, nor in front of prestigious military superiors.

She has never let her voice tremble even as it carried around an entire auditorium. Never let her hands shake as she clutched at her guiding notes.

But now, her heart vulnerable, she falters.

Alex scans the expressions in front of her for any disapproval, trying to gauge their reactions. Behind them through the glass, the DEO is a hive of activity, giving her lab an amniotic stillness. 

“What do you think?” she finally asks.

Kara unfolds her arms, twisting at the thumb-grips of her suit in that girlish way she does. She smiles, broad and genuine. “Beautiful, Alex. Really beautiful.”

“Truly,” J’onn agrees, but his brow is furrowed.

Anxious and insecure after reading the draft of her wedding vows and pouring out her love into the room, Alex drops her shoulders. She chucks her notes to her bench, circling away to put it between them as she asks, “But there’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

Kara looks at J’onn, who scratches his chin.

“I sense it’s missing something,” he says.

“I knew it!” Alex hisses, “I just…I really want to express…” Growing frustrated at the mental block, she lifts a chemical spatula as if to continue the experiment she was conducting before they arrived, but uses it to tap the pages instead. 

“I want to tell Maggie that this has felt inevitable, that even before I came out, I knew she was going to be special for me. That even just as friends, we would spend our lives together.” She twists at the lip of a beaker, looking around her at the tubs of white powder and processing which to begin with. But then she gives up, letting the spatula clink against the empty glass. “I just- I don’t know how.”

“You want to tell her you’re soulmates?” Kara suggests.

Alex shrugs, slumping her elbows against the lab table, defeat heavy on her frame. The simple hourglass she uses more as an ornament than a scientific instrument sits as a mock before her. “I can’t make it come out in a way that isn’t corny.”

“Sometimes, corny is good.” Kara bounces on her toes. “If there’s ever a day to be corny, it’s your wedding day.”

“I struggled to express the very same thing when I asked M'yri'ah to be my wife,” J’onn says. He reaches over, and tips the hourglass on its head, starting the countdown. The three of them watch the falling sand, imagining its hiss, the sound locked inside for none to hear. 

He inspects the notes, the experiment, and then the lab as a whole. Then, he lumbers over to the entrance, leaving his words as a warning. “And you never know if you’ll ever get another chance to tell her, so may I suggest you don’t worry about hiding your heart.”

Alex sobers at the tone. 

He’s right. Every day, their hourglass leaks sand. Yet every grain that has passed is precious, and every one still to come is valued.

If only she knew how to express it.

~

She begins to shed notes, leaving them all around the place, scribbling ideas when she can. Her office, her apartment, her locker; she’s even tempted to scratch some words into her napkin when she spots Maggie gliding through the crowd.

She’d booked this table because while it wasn’t the location of their first date, it was where they had gone for the one that mattered. The one that begin with full-bellied laughter over appetizers and ended with her finally experiencing what it meant to make love to a woman.

Maggie takes her seat, scooting close to the table, and then they lean together for a kiss.

“Hey,” she breathes, leaning back, getting settled, “Sorry I’m a little late.”

“Yeah, I was ready to start in on the table cloth.”

Her fiancée flashes that toothy grin, the one that humours Alex’s flat jokes. She may have been rushing from her shift in the precinct, but there’s a hint of freshly topped up perfume, a glimmer of recently applied makeup around her cheeks, glittering in the sunset.

She’s stunning, heart-stopping, Alex knows. And maybe, she frets, if she was smarter, she would be able to put a voice to that in her vows.

They order their starters and drinks, and then Maggie produces the folded sheet of seating arrangements for the wedding. The marks, crosses and wild arcing arrows all show there has already been several changes to the layout.

“We can’t have Sergeant Hanson beside McIntyre,” Maggie declares.

“Why? I thought they were good friends?”

“They were.” She fixes the edge of their tablecloth, and speaks as if she’s trying to hide the truth away underneath it. “Til McIntyre was found with Hanson’s wife, that was..”

Alex blinks. “When...when did that happen?”

“Last week. Led to a big bust up outside the station. Almost led to suspensions.”

Tapping at the list with her pen, Alex asks, “Should we even invite both of them? We don’t wanna have one of  _ those _ weddings.”

“We can’t uninvite them now, Alex. And besides, they were both pretty good to me when I first came to National City.”

She purses her lips, staring down at the names. Hanson. McIntyre. She clicks the pen in, holds it. They were cops at a cop table, and now they would have to be separated into the sea of cousins, colleagues and aliens. She releases the pen’s top with a resounding  _ clack _ .

Dammit.

They’re no further forward when they order their main. Alex tops up their wine with the bottle, studying the way they have pulled people out and slotted others in. Names revolve around the circular tables, some jumping across the room, some remaining where they were. She closes her eyes and tastes her wine and then lets herself return to the atmosphere of here and now.

The slight evening breeze lifts the ends of her hair and tickles at her cheeks flushed with wine and company.  _ The Whiskey Ship _ has a whole section on a balcony overlooking the marina. In the sunset, she can see each freckle dotting her lover’s nose, see the furrow in her brow as she concentrates on their seating arrangements, and takes the time to savour how lucky she was to have found this woman, this love.

She looks out over the marina. Earlier in the day there was a raft race, and the laughter and chatter of families returning to the boardwalks and heading home drifts up to the balcony. Further down, she can see the sailboats bobbing in the section which is privately owned. With no big ships to spoil the view, she can see further still, out to the ocean.

Maggie sighs and refolds the sheet, shuffling it back into her jacket. She grins, placing her chin on her palm. “What are you thinking about?”

Alex mirrors her, grinning. “I’m very, very in love with you.”

“Okay, softie,” Maggie teases, but she reaches out to brush some hair from Alex’s temple.

Their rings are testament enough that she feels the same. She wants to ask if Maggie is also struggling with putting the depths of her emotions down on paper. Instead, she looks back to the coloured sails of the boats in the harbour. They look almost identical, to someone unfamiliar with the aquatic vehicles. She thinks of them all in a line, all the same, but sailing off into different directions, for different destinations.

After J’onn and Kara spoke with her, she thought about that theory of soulmates. She googled for a while, reading up on hypotheses of alternative universes, and from what she had experienced and heard about Kara’s adventures with Barry, she knew there were endless possibilities for what life could be like for her, or a version of her.

Were she and Maggie together in any of those other lives?

She waits until dessert, until she’s seeing Maggie’s glee at the notion of tiramisu, to bring it up. The inky night has begun to stain the sky and take the sailboats out of sight, but the lights of the marina give enough atmosphere for her to fall deeper into her fiancée's presence.

“Do you ever think about other universes?” she asks.

Maggie swallows a mouthful of wine and nods. “I wonder if we’re together.” She swirls her glass, the marina lights bringing out the twinkle in her eye. “I feel like we are.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Even if the world is completely different or maybe just slightly different, we’re together.”

Alex sits straighter in her chair, observing the other patrons. A woman wears a designer dress two tables away, her wrist, neck and handbag dripping with expense. “So, even if I’m secretly really rich, or maybe the colour of my hair is different?”

“Or you’re secretly a shop owner, or a dentist,” Maggie suggests, “Or a cop.”

“Or a florist. A nuclear physicist. A receptionist for L-Corp.”

“A baker.”

“A baker, Maggie? Really?”

They share a laugh, that same kind of full-throated laughter that takes Alex back to that date when nerves had swirled low in her stomach at the flash-fantasies of flesh on flesh, the anticipation of the possibilities. Now, she feels excitement at the thoughts of white cloth, of blooming spring flowers on a winter’s morning, of trembling voices and the smash of glass underfoot before a cheer.

Maggie softens, toying with her engagement ring. “Endgame is the same, Danvers. You and me.”

“I like that. I like thinking about that.”

“Me too.”

Later, after they’d gone home and made love, Alex lay in Maggie’s arms and wondered how many versions of her were experiencing this very treasure; which Maggie had dug up in her heart, and which she valued above all else.

~

The hourglass tips, up, round, down. Starting its spillage again. 

Alex continues to shed notes, flips the hourglass, works, no solution in sight. She runs missions, eats, sleeps, fucks. But no amount of staring down into Maggie’s eyes as they make love makes the words flow any easier. The wedding steps a day closer, and another, and another. Her gathering nest of notes has no clear thread, no clarity, and no heart. 

It’s only when she and J’onn are doing inventory that she breaks out of the funk. On a dusty shelf, squeezed between two galactical braces, are the headsets they used when Kara was under the influence of the Black Mercy. She reaches out and picks up the gear. 

She remembers the blue lights of the active headset, pulling her into the vivid world of Krypton. She remembers how Winn used to fall over himself regarding Lord Technologies. 

After the inventory check, she signs out the headset and brings it to his desk with a proposition. 

“Plain sailing,” he says, his sarcasm bouncing down into the headset as he brings it closer to examine. 

_ A fitting phrase _ , she thinks, remembering those boats on the marina, their potential to set course for any destination. 

It takes them four slow work days and six interspaced productive days before they are able to wrangle the headsets into the shape they need to be in. On day one, it didn’t even seem possible, but Winn was never going to back down from a challenge involving technology.

She recounts her encounter with the Black Mercy, the experience she had under the spell cast by the technology. They modulate, adjust, modify and enhance, until on the tenth and final day of the process, Winn sits ramrod straight in his chair, gaping at the test run.

“Complete success!” He takes it off with a triumphant cheer, jangling it high above his head. “In another world, I’m a land auctioneer”

“Of all things, ” Alex teases, confiscating the headset before he drops it. But his excitement is earned. She’s proud of him, in awe that they could achieve what had been a far off fantasy.

Now, she paces Room 113, a space used for agents and distressed aliens. It has specifically designed ambience transmitters and mood generators so they can come to cool off or calm down. There are a variety of soft surfaces for them to meditate on, as well as systems to induce vibration, white noise, or even music into the air.

“They’ll work the same,” Winn assures for the third time, hopping between the original headset and a second which he has built and engineered.

“And they’re linked?” Alex asks.

“Yes. For the last time, they’re linked. But if  _ you two _ aren’t linked, there’s nothing I can do about that.” He throws up his hands, then freezes at her raised eyebrow. “I didn’t mean linked like  _ linked _ , like innuendo linked, I just meant in gen- yeah, I’ll shut up now.”

She smirks, but her anxiety fails to abate. “And there’s an emergency disconnect?”

“Yup. Just like last time, except this time it will pick up distressed brain waves.” He stands, brushing off his knees and fishing the key to the room out of his pockets. “All yours.”

Alex looks at the key dangling in the air. “How distressed?”

“Risk of death, distressed. Not, like, angry or fighting distressed.” He shakes the key impatiently.

“Okay.” She takes it, lets the bite of the metal teeth ground her. “Okay.”

Winn’s tablet bleets from the ground, and he scoops it up. It’s a live map of the building, with agent numbers roaming around. He can see everyone in the building, either through a tracker or through the chip in their visitor’s pass. There are government officials inspecting the weaponry, and Maggie entering through the underground entrance.

“Here she is,” he says cheerfully, “It’s showtime, Danvers.”

He strides out of the room, waving over his shoulder as he cradles his tablet. “Good luck, I’ll send her in here.”

The mere single minute it takes for Maggie to reach Room 113 is sheer agony. Alex shakes her hourglass like a snow globe, the rustic sand sifting and dispersing with the force. She brought it in as a lucky talisman, but now she fears it’s a bad omen. 

As the sand settles, she seeks the calm trapped within the curved glass, but she can’t achieve it. She just waits, nerves sparking in her stomach.

Eventually, Maggie pokes her head in the door. “Hey. They told me you were in here.”

“Hey. Shoes!”

Seeing Alex’s boots neatly placed by the entrance, Maggie slips her own off, and steps out onto the padded floor. She curls her toes experimentally, bouncing her heels against it, and then snorts.

“Why do you make us have sex in your windowless office when this place exists?” she mumbles, glancing over to make sure the door swung shut behind her.

Alex ignores her question. “Remember when we talked about other versions of us?”

Her fiancée tilts her head, adjusts the badge on her hip and then folds down into a seated position. She gets comfortable, her palms on her knees, back straight, before she replies. “Yeah?”

“Well, what if there was a way to see inside their worlds?”

“What?”

Jittering with that nervous energy, Alex rushes to lock them in, and then rushes back. She jerkily drops onto the cushioned floor and gestures to the headsets. Maggie eyes them as if they might jump up at any second. Persisting, she pushes a set towards the other woman and taps at the top of it. 

“This latches on to our...essence,” she explains, “It finds it in other worlds through different vibrational speeds, and lets us experience a virtual reality, dream-like sequence of what they’re experiencing.”

Maggie picks up a headset, testing its weight in her hands, turning it over and pulling lightly at the headstrap. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. This was used to penetrate the Black Mercy’s hold on Kara. Now, we can use semi-portal technology to steal a pinch of another world and have it play out right here.”

Maggie scrutinizes the headset as she would evidence at a crime scene. Winn’s craftsmanship exceeds the decent standard Alex had asked for. The wires wind like vines around the frame, neatly tacked to the body of the headset. She also suspects he polished the lenses on the eye-gear. 

“What are the risks?” Maggie asks, pressing her thumbs into the squishy leather-like plastic of the ear-gear, “Cause there’s gotta be some huge ones, right?”

“It’s dangerous. Before, we could have been trapped in the cerebral field if our brainwaves rejected the interference,” Alex concedes, “But since we used it for Kara, Winn and I have minimised those risks. Now we have emergency disconnect to bring us out of it no matter what happens in there.”

Sceptical and hesitating, Maggie raises her eyebrows. “You’re sure about this?”

“Don’t do it if you don’t want to.” Alex reaches out for the headset, but Maggie immediately retracts it, holding it close to her chest like a toy Alex wanted to steal from her. 

“No I-” They share a grin at the childish reaction. Maggie relaxes her hold, letting the headset rest in her lap.“I want to see, I mean I know you have crazy tech in this place. And I trust you.”

“Trust that we have emergency disconnect, too. If it gets too dangerous, or scary, we’re out.”

“I do.” 

Those two words smother the atmosphere in the room. They can hear the rumbles and mumbles of the busy DEO above, below, around Room 113. But they also hear those two words, out of context, trembling like the final note of a song. 

It’s Alex who clears her throat and shuffles towards a sheepish Maggie until their knees bump. She pushes Maggie’s hair behind her ears and reaches for the headset, settling the frame down over her head. She shuffles the headphones down and tightens at the strap, tilting her lover’s chin this way and that to check the mobility. 

“Comfortable?” Maggie nods. “Not too tight?” She shakes her head. “Good.” 

Alex leaves the eye-gear up, clicking on the side until the frame’s blue lights come to life. Then she shifts backwards towards the Conductor, a tablet-like device which will link the headsets into the same vibrational pattern for the Earth. 

“I hope we’re not doing anything dangerous,” Maggie says, spreading her hands out behind her and leaning back. 

“We might not even be together,” Alex says, not looking up from the Conductor. 

“What?”

Alex does look up at the tone of surprise. “You’ll see you, and I’ll see me. We might not even know each other there.”

The Conductor pings, and she sees their icons coming up onscreen. 

Maggie cranes her neck. “You’ve matched these sets to our genetic profiles in the DEO database?”

“Very good,” Alex says, setting the Conductor aside and lifting her own headset on, “Guess I’m not the only science nerd in the room, huh?”

“Shut up.”

She fixes it around her ears and loosens the strap around the back of her skull. Then she rifles around the menus and settings of the Conductor, scanning for any irregularities and running a final systems check. 

“Pull the eye-gear down,” she instructs, pointing at Maggie’s headset. “Ready?”

Despite having never used this kind of technology before, Maggie pulls her eye-gear down right away and sits up straighter. “Ready when you are.”

Alex sets the Conductor down alongside the hourglass, which has already gone back to stillness. With a smile, she tips it up and starts the run of sand again. Then she presses the initiator on the Conductor, and gets her ten second countdown. 

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Alex says, shoving down her own eye-gear, “And we aren’t doing anything danger-”

~

Her thigh cramps from pressing down on the accelerator too hard. An engine pushed to its limit growls ferociously. The wheels squeal as she pulls off impossibly tight turns.

The heavy sway of the vehicle as she tests the extent of its abilities should make her more nervous as they zip through the thoroughfare. 

Streets and vehicles blur into a multicoloured spectrum on either side of her, the only focus being her goal.

A crackle goes up on the dash.  _ “Come in, 208.” _

Her partner, J’onn, picks up the call. “208 here, receiving.”

_ “How far out, 208?” _

Alex jumps in. “ETA 2 minutes.”

“4 minutes,” J’onn corrects.

“2 minutes,” she confirms, pushing the bus harder down through the streets and blaring the horn at a cyclist who jerks to the right.

_ “Uh, I’ll take that as 2 minutes ETA.” _

“Thank you, Winn,” J’onn says pointedly, staring at his partner, “We’ll try to arrive in one piece.”

Despite the adrenaline of a big job, Alex grins. As paramedics, they had been through the trenches together, J’onn being her guide, mentor, friend and rock. Fresh-faced and bandy-legged from her training, she hadn’t expected the horrors that working for the National City emergency services could bring.

True to her word, Alex brings the ambulance to a screeching stop just over 2 minutes later. Blue lights flash from every direction, and she looks past them to focus on the grey mound in front of them.

“Goddamn,” J’onn marvels and then jumps out.

Alex hops out after, slamming the door shut. She grabs a bag from the back, slings it over her shoulder, and heads for the fray. She’s only stopped by a navy body pacing up beside her.

“Hey,” she greets.

(She takes pride in the fact her heartbeat only skips once, instead of the flutter it usually performs when she sees Sawyer on a scene like this.)

“Hey,” Maggie returns, heading in the same direction. “Glad you could join us.”

They duck under the perimeter tape, where bystanders gawk for a better view of the chaos, even as uniformed rookies advise them to stay back. Alex shakes a pair of gloves out of her uniform pocket, stretching them on , “What’ve we got?”

“Building collapse, boiler blew. Up to thirty people trapped.”

They stop several metres from the start of the debris, Alex straining this way and that on her tiptoes to see her first point of contact. She gives up and looks to her friend to guide her. They were old hands at scenes like this, Maggie being an experienced incident commander. “Okay. Anyone you’ve identified needing immediate attention?”

“Couple of crews here already,” Maggie says, gesturing around, “Think you and your sister could come with me? All these people are still trapped under some rubble. Got caught when they were escaping. Could be some seriously urgent cases.”

“Kara’s here?” Alex says, turning to see the firetruck, and heading that way. She glances at Maggie, who follows.

As a firefighter, it is inevitable that Kara would be working this scene. Yet Alex never gets used to the anxiety of having her younger sister working potentially perilous scenes such as these.

Kara is kneeling in front of her specialist colleague, helping on their booties.

“Good girl, Gertrude,” she cooes, stroking the retriever’s long coat, “You’re gonna do a lot of good work today, yes you are.”

She stands, beams at her sister, and then adjusts Gertrude’s harness. With one final pat to the head, she gives her sister and the officer her full attention.

“Ready?”

“Yup.”

Maggie stops several times to command her colleagues, or advise them on how the situation was progressing. Together they stride towards the crook of the building where machinery and equipment are already being put in place.

Gertrude leaps up, sniffing at an opening in the fractured concrete, her front paws dancing as she whines, and then barks.

“Good girl,” Kara praises, climbing up onto the perch. She pokes her torch into the gap. “Hello?”

“Hello?” comes a hoarse, quiet reply.

“Hi there. I’m Kara, and this is Officer Sawyer and my sister.” She peers in closer, speaking to someone buried under the mound of broken building. “She’s a paramedic. She’s gonna ask a couple questions, okay?”

“Okay,” is the shaky response.

Kara nods, signing off to them, and then clicks her teeth, coaxing Gertrude upwards for another search. Alex clambers up into her place, setting down her bag and peeking into the opening.

“Hi there,” she says cheerily, pulling her bag in front of her and unzipping it, “How you doing?”

Trapped in the rumble is a girl no older than seven, caked in grey dust. “Where’s my mom?” she asks.

Alex hums, “I know you really wanna talk to your mom, but we’re gonna have to concentrate on you first, okay?” She clicks on her torch and peeks down into the space in the chunks of concrete. “Are you hurt anywhere?

The girl nods, filthy and afraid in her enclave. Alex can see she has a bloody, smeared trail from her hairline to her cheek, and while it seems superficial, she knows any head injury is worrying.

It’s an operation, but they get her out. As the machines lift away the debris to free her, Alex darts about where J’onn, Kara or Maggie shout for her to go. She helps set a broken leg for transport, holds a man’s head still as they work on a possible spine injury, and comforts a woman traumatised by it all.

Eventually Maggie jerks her head and they return to the girl, who hasn’t managed to get transported to the hospital yet. Alex gently cleans her forehead, noticing how she twitches and winces but refuses to cry.

“You’re being so brave,” she remarks. “You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met.”

“Even braver than the police woman?” the girl asks, her green eyes glinting with humour.

Alex cranes over her shoulder to see Maggie consulting with a news crew, and that now familiar stir begins in her stomach- 

They’d met on a one-two. The first incident was pure pressure, the kind only present on bad days or training days. It involved a factory fire, chemicals in play, civilians swarming onto scene from surrounding housing. By the time Alex and J’onn had arrived, the NCPD and NCFD were already trying to set up emergency triage spots. 

When all was said and done with transporting patients to hospital, Alex used her lunch break to go to Station 12 and check on her sister. She had seen Kara carry no less than three unconscious people out from the roaring flames, and while she knew Kara was simply performing her job, it was her instinct to do a final check. 

Hopping from her firetruck, Kara took off her helmet and wiped at the soot around her hairline. “Who was that new girl? She was way more on the ball than the previous guy who did fire scenes with us.”

Alex thought of the incident commander barking orders over the deafening noise of a dozen people trying to fight a blaze. “No idea.”

The second of the one-two was four hours later, near the end of her shift. Alex and J’onn were called to something relatively harmless. A kid had been knocked off their bike in a low-speed accident which occurred in a residential area. Still, the NCPD were the first responders, and Alex saw that woman again, treating the kid with such compassion as she checked out the motions of their arm. 

And for months, they’ve been dancing, but while their incidents align, their shift patterns never do. They text, they exchange banter, but they can never manage to spend time together outside their rotas.

Finally, in the back of the ambulance last week after a particularly harrowing case, they’d shared a kiss, one that left Alex gasping for more. But the radio sounded, and she had to go.

They’d talked about it since, over text, but they hadn’t really gotten round to talking in person.

Maggie catches her eye, and for a second all the dust, the rubble, the chaos is quiet. And then the officer starts over, and Alex turns back to the girl with a wink.

“Oh, you’re way braver than the police woman.”

“A second crew is picking up her mom,” Maggie says, crouching down to the girl’s height. “Do you wanna go with her?”

The girl nods, and Maggie smiles, holding out her hand. Alex sits back on her heels, watching her lead the girl to another waiting ambulance.

At the end of it all, two and a half hours after they had arrived on site, Alex stands surveying the scene. She takes it all in, the diggers, the fluttering perimeter tape, her sister coaxing a tired Gertrude back into the firetruck.

Maggie appears at her elbow again, whistling at the collapsed building. “That’s gonna cost the city a pretty penny.”

But Alex doesn’t want to talk about taxes or infrastructure, she wants to grasp the quiet seconds while she still can. She whirls around, catching Maggie by surprise. “Listen, are you off or on duty this Saturday?”

Maggie blinks. “You need another delivery of stale coffee to the ambulance dock?”

“Actually, I was wondering -”

“Alex.” She spins to see J’onn half-in the bus. “We have another call. Multiple car collision on Blossom Avenue.”

She drops her shoulders. Another chance, lost in the madness of their jobs. But fingertips reach out and lift her chin, brown eyes shimmering with understanding.

“Be careful out there,” Maggie says, “We’ll get time.”

The cruiser is parked beside her ambulance, and Alex lingers as Maggie opens the door. The radio is going, dispatch trying to get in touch with her. She hears  _ Blossom Avenue _ , through the crackle, her ears pricking up. 

“You coming to the next one?” she asks.

“Ride or die,” Maggie answers, ducking back into her cruiser.

Every job is different. She jumps back into the ambulance and shuts the door as J’onn puts his foot down on the pedal. She watches the rubble whizzle away to a grey spec in her wing mirror and wonders what kind of day it’s gonna be -


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would just like to thank my friend for helping me with the details of this chapter. I know this story isn't like my usual ones, so thank you for those who are reading anyway :)

It is shaping up to be a good day, but it was a bad night.

Coffee is not just the elixir she needs to remedy getting no sleep; it will be the gesture of goodwill she needs to apologise for kicking her lover out of bed the night before. 

The morning sunshine hasn’t quite reached the window, shading out the entire kitchen. In the dim, she sits as still as the bonsai adorning the centre of the dining table. It had been bought as a departure gift before Maggie’s final trip overseas, when Alex was left behind for the first time, and they weren’t serving together any longer. 

She’s listening to the coffee machine, the birds outside, the kitchen clock ticking on the wall, looming above her. 

Some days she feels like Sisyphus, shouldering that boulder uphill, just to watch it tumble back down again. On those days, it is dark, and she stands on that mountaintop, exposed to the elements. The wind and sleet beating her, thunder roaring overhead. 

She is not alone in weathering that storm, however, but sometimes she forgets. Now, she’s brewing coffee just the way Maggie likes it. 

She struggles up, gritting her teeth against her stiffness, and manages to make her way to the coffee machine. She pulls a mug from the cupboard and squints out at the bright summer’s day.

Maggie had always said Alex was the love of her life, but the garden is in hot contention for that title. When they were searching for a house, she’d insisted they get a space she could nourish into bloom. Alex watches her now, craning her neck back and enjoying the sun on her skin. It is the perfect morning for tending to the flowers, the bushes and the hedge. For weeding out the choking bad energy. 

Pretending to sleep this morning, Alex had heard Maggie creeping around the bedroom, grabbing her things, changing in the bathroom, and then heading out into the garden. Now she kneels on the grass, tools spread out around her. 

The phantom sensation of warm grass on her knees translates into the cool, dim kitchen. 

Alex’s throat closes. 

Leaning out over the kitchen sink, she watches as Maggie rolls her shoulders into her back. She curses the fact Maggie chose to sleep on the couch instead of the guest room last night. She’s aware it is a force of habit to put more space between them on nights like that, but the morning didn’t make for spectacular results.

She focuses on the slow drip of the coffee machine, taking a nourishing breath in through her nose, and trying to let out her tension with the exhale. The birds aren’t singing as loudly now. She hangs her head and plays with the handle of the mug. 

She concentrates on breathing away the bitterness, and pours Maggie’s coffee, glancing at their dog puttering around on the stone path that snakes through the grass. When Gertrude comes within arm’s reach, Maggie reaches out and strokes the German Shepherd’s fur. It draws the first smile out of Alex that morning.

As if it were fate, they’d met straight out of the gate after Maggie’s helicopter came to less of a crash and more of a bump. The dazed UN peacekeeper had been greeted by a medic who, if Alex admits, was a little too spritely when she checked her over for injury and concussion. Sliding off Maggie’s blue UN helmet, Alex had divulged a lot of information quickly, having only just been flown in that morning. She had been thrilled to get straight to work. All Maggie had done was smile at her rambling.

From that dimpled smile out in the blazing African sun, Alex was smitten.

Even before signing up to work with  _ Doctors Without Borders _ , she had taken an oath to do no harm, but as she settled into base, she’d fantasised about injuries, small and trivial things, just to see the peacekeeper from the helicopter again. Then came the day that Maggie’s unit were involved in a minor skirmish, and were brought in to be checked over. 

A touch of banter, the promise of a return, and suddenly they were having a borderline illicit affair. They met when they could, kissed out of sight, but restricted their time to avoid suspicion. Relationships between NGOs and UN divisions were frowned upon by their superiors, who breathed down their neck. 

Somehow, fortunately, their time back on US soil coincided. Since by another stroke of luck they were both living in National City, they consummated at home what they didn’t have the courage to abroad.

Alex’s smile twitches and eases further, the memory acting as a sun coming out from behind the clouds. She swirls syrup into Maggie’s coffee, sweetening it, feeling the ceramic mug heat under her palm and remembering the heat of that summer’s night years ago. 

Over time, they’d stuck it out, the sneaking around. While they hadn’t been caught, they knew their luck had to run out, it just didn’t run out how they expected.

It was a turbulent time; the risk of ambush versus their duty of care was a dizzying atmosphere to try and make any decision in. One day, they were informed about some local children who felt poorly. Their mother had called to the clinic Alex was appointed to, begging for someone to come and help. 

She along with two other medics packed up and made their way into town. Sure enough, four children were huddled in a single room. As she knelt between their cots and assessed their illness, she heard her colleague shout for her from where he had gone to get their supplies from their truck. She didn’t immediately register his distress, so involved in her duty to treat the children. 

It cost her a leg. 

She didn’t have time to do much more than stand up from the beds before there was an explosion. And yet pinned under debris, Alex had persevered through the dust, the screeching and the gunfire, and acted instinctively - she continued to treat the wounded.

The children had been injured by their house being blown in around them, two of them critically. Even as the village warred outside, Alex managed to pant and sob her way through instructing a junior medic to help the children before her. Even in excruciating pain, her leg crushed and mangled by the debris, she had gotten them through the medical explanation that helped the trainee to save the two girls’ lives.

The hardest time in their relationship was Maggie’s final stint when Alex was home, adjusting to her loss alone. She had seen others go through the gut-wrenching emotional and physical process after amputation, and yet had been wholly unaware of the possibility for herself. In all honesty, she thought that was the end of them. How could Maggie want to devote any time to her when she would have to deal with her own reintegration into society?

Yet Maggie bought the bonsai tree for her the day before she left, using it as a symbol of the promise she would return and they would plant a new life together. Grow it together, tend to it together. 

She was a healer, not a fighter. But she fought to get well for Maggie. 

She was there, waiting for Maggie as she stepped off the plane from her final UN peacekeeping mission. She was leaning on a crutch, weary of the recovery, but holding her head up in the Californian sunshine.

And when they married, their wedding vows had said in sickness and in health, which they knew came in many forms. 

Alex cracks the window to ventilate the kitchen and listens to Maggie’s chastising of their dog as it barrels into her side. 

“Gertrude!” she scolds.

The dog, clearly wanting to play, wiggles her hind in the air. She runs in a circle around Maggie, and then lurches off to gab a toy. A failed bomb dog, she had been given to Maggie and Alex as a puppy, and had remained a puppy ever since. 

“You gonna help me, buddy?” Maggie asks. Gertrude quirks her head, tongue lolling out, panting in the morning sunshine. “You do enough digging, don’t you, girl?”

Now that she’s started, Alex can’t stop smiling. She lifts the mug and limps towards the patio and sliding the door. Gertrude spins at the noise, her ears straight up, and she bounds over to say good morning to her other human. 

They’ve had good years together living in the suburbs. Maggie works security and Alex works in a local hospital as a trauma doctor, and they get by. There’s good nights and bad nights, like last night, but their trust was unbreakable; it had been since that first time they’d made love again after having these horrible experiences, when Maggie had been undressing her and had shakily asked to slide off Alex’s prosthetic, asking for an intimacy that had to be granted.

There’s love. There’s passion. There’s care. But there is also duty. They both served a cause they believed in, and now ultimately they serve each other. Alex thinks she values Maggie’s loyalty overall. 

She limps out towards her wife, favouring her good side. She smiles at Gertrude’s antics, waving her tail high in the air and trotting alongside her. 

“Sorry, this isn’t for you, baby,” she says, pausing to scratch the shepherd’s ears. 

As if understanding, Gertrude becomes disinterested and goes off the sniff the Hydrangeas. Reaching Maggie, she hands over the mug and carefully lowers herself down onto the grass. Maggie cradles the mug and keeps her eyes trained on her shears. She always lets Alex come to her, instead of pushing.

They listen to the rustle of Gertrude nosing the plants, and then, “About last night-”

Maggie nips the apologetic tone in the bud. “Nope.”

“Okay,” Alex says. She smiles, shy even if they’ve been married now for years.

Maggie told her long ago never to apologise for what she experienced. Alex remembers what she tells Alex every time they have a bad night like this: 

_ “I’m here to help you heal.” _

Alex kisses her softly, in the middle of their lawn. She remembers her demons from the night before, crowding around her, blocking out the wealth of joy life has brought her. She presses her lips harder against her wife’s, remembers how Maggie had called her actions that day an act of bravery, to continue to work while knowing there was no hope for her own leg, giving instructions until she passed out.

Alex pulls away, and observes the garden. “Wow.”

“Right?” Maggie picks up her miniature shovel, twirling it in her hands. “It’s really blooming.”

“All with your tender loving care.”

Maggie laces their hands together. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Alex watches Gertrude trotting around, trying to get the memory through the deluge of darkness that came after it, like trying to claw treasure from the mud. “Girl came to see me yesterday, she’s only seven. Fairground accident, she slipped down into a machine.”

Maggie hisses. “What happened?”

“Her arm was crushed. We couldn’t save it at General.”

A breeze picks up, whooshing through each blade of grass, each leaf on their tall oak tree. Gertrude sniffs at the air, ears back. Maggie lets it settle, lets Alex continue to have her time. 

“I just-” Alex waves an arm, looks at the garden tools as if they may have answers. “I kept thinking about how she’s gonna have to live with that her whole life, being different, having the other kids treat her different. I mean, she’s just a kid.”

She plays with the handle of the hedge shears, and then lets her hand lie limp in the grass. “I guess I went somewhere darker than I have in a little while.”

Maggie lifts the small shovel and taps it on the ground. “It’s just a dip.”

“It is. I’m-” Maggie holds out the tool in warning, and Alex laughs, leaning in to kiss her again.

They bask in the sunny morning a little longer, then, “Well, since it’s Saturday, and neither of us have work...Do you wanna go spend some time in the bed you got kicked out of last night?”

She struggles up to stand, but makes it without help, always determined to stand on her own. Maggie looks up in surprise at that being that, but when Alex waves her up, she too stands and brushes the smudges of dirt from her knees.

Alex heads for the house, abandoning the mug, the dog, the wife. Maggie lingers, seemingly weighing it up for herself. Reaching the kitchen, Alex looks at the bonsai on the table. They have grown and tended to their life together. The symbol is thriving. 

Maggie brushes past her, catching her elbow on the way past and dragging her towards the stairs.

Taking care to climb each step at a time, she smiles at the thought of that bonsai. 

It’s survived this long, and it will survive again.

~

It wasn’t a bonsai tree, just a tiny cactus. 

She couldn’t find any in the garden store she’d been to over the weekend, so this would have to do. 

In some sort of compulsion, she pricks the end of her fingertip with one of the spikes of the cactus, letting the sting distract her from the frenetic energy inside. The whole time she had been on her home visit, she couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie, about the steps they’d taken together the previous week.

God, after that, going home for a visit had been agony.

They’d been friends since the first class. It was mandatory, and while Alex had no interest in the subject, being bumped ahead academically meant having some forfeits in choice. She and Maggie were fast friends, texting each other with a dry sense of humour which developed into the kind of friendship that felt as if they were constantly walking in-step.

It was at a party that the circuit had clicked on and the light above Alex’s head finally lit up. She had known Maggie was a lesbian, but she just didn’t realise that the sickness she felt when her friend talked about kissing other girls was jealousy. 

A chance kiss in a corner led to her stumbling after Maggie as she tugged on her hand. Gyrating bodies and sticky surfaces surrounded them as Maggie led her through the crowd, but Alex kept up, kept seeking out every playful glance Maggie threw over her shoulder. 

They ended up in the bathroom, Alex choosing not to ask questions and ruin the moment, least Maggie stop kissing her. 

Someone threw up in the hallway waiting for them to vacate the bathroom, but Alex had balanced on the edge of the filthy sink and felt like she was in heaven. 

(Or at least, the heaven she had felt until a few nights ago). 

They didn’t go home together from the party, but had texted all through the night. 

_ “So you’re saying you like me?”  _ Alex asked, nibbling her lip, eyes straining at the white light of her phone through the 4am darkness.  _ _

_ “Yeah, I really like you.” _

So they’d dated, and Alex had gone home to come out to Kara. And then -  _ then _ \- they’d taken the next step. 

Maggie had been with two girls before her, but she didn’t mind that she would be Alex’s first, and Alex, well, she’d certainly felt her nerves melting away as her body reacted to every touch, every kiss.

Her ears flush as she performs a sweep of the room, folding stray clothes and smoothing her bed covers. They’d been together three times now, but still the very thought of it turns her brainwaves to mush. She tidies up notes, textbooks, thinking of how she couldn’t get enough. 

Her entire visit to Midvale, they’d exchanged suggestive and then salacious messages. And Kara had known right away, had recognised the changes in her sister for what they were and spent the weekend asking all kinds of questions that Alex got really flustered about. 

A knock. 

Alex careens two heavy textbooks off the desk in surprise. She just about centres herself by the time she reaches the door. 

Behind it, Maggie is standing there wearing her Midvale sweater, and Alex ends up saying “ _ Come in _ ” several octaves too high. Hope of composure lost, she bites the inside of her cheek and focuses on the stitching of  _ Midvale High _ across her girlfriend’s chest. 

It was an odd choice that the school council at Midvale High had made, to go with sweaters rather than hoodies for their graduating year group. Alex had lamented about how lame they were, and hadn’t even realised she had brought it to college with her. 

“This is pretty preppy for you,” Alex teases.

“Yeah?” Maggie shuts the door behind her, coy, fully aware of what Alex is really staring at. She traces around the burgundy stitching, tempting. 

“Yeah. Cute though.”

“Hope you don’t mind I borrowed this from last time?”

Alex opens her mouth, closes it, and meets her girlfriend’s eye. Last time; when they’d scrambled to get dressed because they had slept through her alarm and she had to drive home that morning. “I don’t mind at all.”

The air is charged in that way it is before a storm, and she leans in to kiss Maggie, pressing her back against the door. 

“I missed you this weekend,” she murmurs, pulling back but keeping her hands resting on Maggie’s lower back. 

Maggie gives her this demure smile, but she’s quiet, eyes dark, leaning back in. There’s hunger, the lack of want for a distraction and after Alex’s weekend, her body is in agreement.

When Maggie pulls her towards the dorm’s bed, she’s a little surprised. The three times they’ve slept together, it’s been trembling bodies pressed together in the dark, beneath the sheets, fumbling and kissing and shuddery sighs against the shell of an ear guiding them home to pleasure.

But this is the middle of the day between classes. She falls to the mattress, letting it squeak beneath her. She watches Maggie slide the Midvale sweater up and drop it to the floor and she  _ wants _ it. 

She pulls Maggie down and rolls them over, stripping them as quickly as their passions allow. Their heads get caught in neck holes, socks remain on, they attempt to remove jeans before shoes - but finally they’re in their underwear. Seeing her girlfriend’s bare skin in the light is different from waking up in the morning together, where they’re shy and darting around for their clothes.

Maggie nips at her lower lip, watching Alex carefully. “Are you okay?”

“Okay?” Alex rasps, her voice lower than she expected, arousal thickening the words, “I’m more than okay. I’m...really okay. And I just...really wanna go down on you.”

Maggie nods shakily, breathing her assent, “Yeah.”

She’s done so twice before for Maggie. But that was like a test, rushing and concentrating and trying, trying,  _ trying _ to give her girlfriend gratification, panicking that she might not be able to make her come. 

This is different. This is all the time in the world, this is more confidence, this is wanting the act, not just the end. 

The  _ act,  _ the  _ processes. _ Alex tastes the skin as she kisses her way down, she unclasps Maggie’s bra instead of breathlessly waiting for her girlfriend to do it. She tries, she tongues, she sees what Maggie responds to other than hurried kissing and frantic pawing at the front of her underwear. 

Maggie’s breathing is heavy, and as her lower stomach clenches at the initial moan, Alex enjoys taking the lead this fourth time. 

She slides Maggie’s underwear off, untwisting it from around one bony ankle, and then flattens herself to the mattress. It’s not the tallest bed, and her shins hang awkwardly off the edge, but she props herself on her elbows and decides it’s fit enough for her purpose. 

She goes down on her girlfriend like that, with them bare above the sheets. She savours the taste of her, the heat, the way anyone outside could hear them. She savours just how fucking  _ gay _ she is. 

She doesn’t chase Maggie’s orgasm as usual. She lets it come to her. She leans into every moan, builds up to the false crests, grips thighs and shins lithe from Maggie’s soccer practise. And finally, at the twitching, the pleading, the hands clenching new life into Alex’s flat dorm pillow, she brings Maggie to the heights of pleasure she never has achieved before. 

After, Alex tucks herself into Maggie’s side, kissing at a tendon in her girlfriend’s neck spasming with aftershocks, her hand curled around Maggie’s hip.

“That was pretty uh-” Maggie sucks in a breath, and seemingly can’t find the words. “That was really nice.”

“Nice?” Alex parrots, grinning too, pinching her side. “I just go down on you and it’s  _ nice? _ ”

“I said it was  _ really _ nice,” Maggie counters, rolling them over. 

They’re kissing again, Alex letting herself be pressed into the stiff university mattress. Her girlfriend pushes her hips down at the taste of herself on Alex’s lips and tongue. But just as noises grow needy, as touches grow bolder, she pulls back. 

“I don’t wanna be one to receive and not give,” Maggie says, “but if we keep going, you’re gonna be late for class.”

“Screw class,” Alex digs her fingertips into Maggie’s tailbone, pressing them together hip to hip, breast to breast. “I wanna stay here and...continue.”

Maggie gives her a wide, flirty grin. “Don’t you have a final tomorrow?”

“Well, you’re the best study buddy I have,” Alex says, sliding her hands up the curve of Maggie’s bare back to her shoulder blades. “I can just cram until 3am again-”

~

“It’s not almost 3am again, is it?”

Alex doesn’t look up from where she is attempting to budge her stuck protein bar from the vending machine. She shoves, shakes, shoulders, but it doesn’t move. She leans against the glass and turns to confirm the time. The clock is indeed creeping towards 3am.

“I could take it off the wall, wind it back to 9, if you prefer to pretend it’s a more sociable hour,” she suggests, slipping her hands in her pockets.

Her companion snorts, clicking her pen, but not taking her attention off her clipboard. “When do we ever meet in the same room at a sociable hour?”

“Point taken.”

If she thinks about it enough, she knows she can’t exactly call their meetings pleasant. The only time Alex has an excuse to call in Maggie is when she needs CPS, whom she works for. Those scenarios are rarely walks in the park, but she can’t help but feel the woman brightens up her nightshifts anyway.

They’d met about four months ago on a case at 2am, and with grace, compassion and competency, Maggie Sawyer changed Detective Danvers’ whole perspective on Child Services. Previously, she had sour expectations of what help they actually provided, as Clark Grayson had been the on-call help that her bullpen was told to call. 

Alex adjusts her detective’s badge. “Coffee?”

“Yes- wait-” Maggie finally looks up, folding her arms over her clipboard. “You call ahead and don’t even put on a fresh pot for me? Did I do something wrong last time?”

Chuckling, Alex saunters over to the coffee machine. “High standards for 3am, Sawyer.”

They lapse back into a comfortable silence. Between the rhythmic clicks from night-workers in the bullpen, the ticking of the break room clock, and the hum of the vending machine, it is a busy silence, even at 3am. 

Alex goes from watching the slow drip of coffee, to the fine, neat pantsuit Maggie wears, and back to the coffee. When it’s done, she pours two cups, and enjoys how well Ms Sawyer looks even at this hour. 

“Nice blouse,” she says, admiring the teal colour. 

Maggie raises an eyebrow, blowing on her polystyrene cup and then grimacing at her first sip of coffee. “More than I can say for this, I’m afraid.”

“You said it.” 

Alex leads her back out of the break room and down the corridor, seeing how Maggie carefully checks her clipboard before saying, “So, tell me what happened, in your own words.”

“Right.” She stops and nods for them to enter an observation room. They shuffle into the dark together, and see through the glass into the interrogation space. There’s a girl there, no older than five, with a rookie sat opposite her. He dances around a pink bear, trying to make her laugh. 

“Dad’s not in the picture, mom was inviting strange men over. One man and mom are having an argument on the fire escape, she careens over the side, he runs, neighbours call us,” Alex says, crossing her arms low across her stomach, “By the time we get there, the kid is hiding under the bed, wondering why the shouting suddenly stopped. She was too scared to come out.”

“Damn,” Maggie says. She takes another few sips of coffee, contemplating, and then, “Any chance she witnessed it?”

“She says she stayed under the bed but…” Alex shrugged a shoulder, looking to Maggie’s profile to see her assessment. 

“She’s pretty shaken up.” 

“You would be too, wouldn’t you?”

Maggie’s lips twitch as she turns, holding her clipboard to her stomach. She discards her paper cup in the trash can at their feet. “I don’t think anything gets under your skin, Danvers.”

Alex’s eyes deliberately glance down to her lips and back. “You’d be surprised.”

She follows Maggie into the interrogation room, nodding the rookie off his post. Maggie sits down first, in the seat beside the girl, Alex sitting opposite. 

Maggie discreetly places her clipboard and briefcase beside her, keeping her focus on the girl. “Hi there. I’m Maggie, I’m here to see if you’re okay.”

The child looks at her warily, then at Alex, then at the bear that the rookie abandoned. “I wanna go home.” 

“I know sweetie.” 

Alex thinks of that apartment, when she found the girl cowering under the rickety bed, the filthy sheets, bare of toys or possessions. “What’s your name?”

The girl glances between them and says something, but it’s too quiet, and she’s staring at the wooden interrogation table. Alex slowly curls her hands into fists and tucks them away out of sight. This room is where she makes criminals sweat, but this girl is a victim. She doesn’t deserve to be here. 

Alex tries again. “What was that, sweetheart?”

“Jamie.”

She realises something in a flash flood - she carried the girl out of the apartment, hiding her face against her bulletproof vest. She was in that compartmentalised cop-zone, her empathy didn’t kick start. She berates herself, softening now, exhausted at 3am but trying to gain this girl’s trust. 

“I’m Detective Danvers,” she says, her body language open and easy, smiling, “But you can call me Alex, if you want.”

The girl’s eyes dart to Maggie, and then, “Hello.”

“I bet you’re tired, Jamie,” Maggie says.

Jamie nods, and Alex suggests, “Well, how about I go find some blankets, and you come take a nap in my office, huh?” The girl doesn’t seem to want to budge, glancing at the pink fluffy bear, but then she splits into a yawn. “I got a huge, comfy couch for you to nap on.”

“Huge,” Maggie agrees, “My legs don’t even reach the end.”

“That’s cause she’s so short,” Alex says. 

Jamie cracks the first hint of a smile. Light returns to dulled eyes, too young for trauma, and Maggie plays off of it. “And if you need something to help you get a good sleep,” she leans in, whispering dramatically, “I hear this one tells  _ great _ bedtime stories.”

Jamie finally lets out a soft giggle, hoarse from the late hour. She grabs the bear that the rookie had left. “Can I bring Mr Snuffles?”

“Absolutely.” Alex stands, slowly so as not to startle the girl. “Hey, you can keep him, if you want.”

Mr Snuffles is Alex’s duty bear. She keeps it in her cruiser for exactly this reason, when a girl or boy is left behind in the aftermath of one trauma or another. She thinks again back to that bland room, damp in the corner, no toys. She’ll just make a note to get a new one. In the meantime, this girl needs it more.

When the girl is asleep, tucked in the blankets, they assign the rookie to look after her again, and step out together. 

“I’ll get the paperwork drawn up and take her with me,” Maggie says, tucking her clipboard into her briefcase, “We can let her sleep for a half hour while I get it done.”

“Good idea.” Alex stretches her arms over her head, mewling, and then grimacing at her watch. “And I’m finally gonna clock off, four hours after I should have.”

“Well, you could have handed this case over to another detective.”

Alex grins, holding her belt and leaning against the notice board. “And risk having one of your colleagues mishandle this?”

Maggie’s expression reads  _ don’t be facetious,  _ but the shimmer in her eye shows her gratitude that Alex trusts her ability to make terrible situations right. “Thank you, Detective Danvers.”

“Thank you,” Alex says warmly. She trusts Maggie will do the right thing in preventing Jamie from falling through the cracks. “The NCPD is always happy to assist in any follow-up arrangements.”

“Well, the NCPD can visit me any time they wish.” Maggie leans in closer. “Even in the daytime.” 

“They might just do that.”

“Maybe they might just treat me to actual coffee.” She flattens her skirt, tucking her briefcase in her hand.

“Real, day-time coffee?” Alex shakes her head, pretending to think it over. She glances around the empty precinct corridor. “Doesn’t sound legit” 

Maggie smiles, the one with the dimples. She brushes her elbow as she goes to the office to finish her paperwork. 

“See you around Danvers.”

~ ** **   
** **

“NCPD. Open up.”

The door swings wide and Maggie’s eyes bug out of her head. Humiliation burns up Alex’s cheek as she adjusts the belt around her waist. 

“Wow,” Maggie breathes out in a single rush. 

Alex’s attempt to be stern melts instantly. She looks down her body at the navy uniform, shifting from foot to foot in her boots. Even the cap feels foreign. “I feel ridiculous.”

“You look very, very attractive.” Maggie follows her gaze. “And you polished your boots for the occasion.”

Alex snuffles out an embarrassed laugh, trying to suppress the alien feeling itching across her skin. Roleplay hadn’t always been on the cards for them, but events had conspired and props were discussed.

They hadn’t met under the happiest of circumstances, but a presumed serial killer never is much cause for celebration. The string of murders that Alex had been tracking down eventually included a body which Detective Sawyer was unwilling to give over to the FBI. 

After Maggie’s initiative had gotten the more real results, connections to suspects and evidence than Alex’s FBI colleagues had, she begrudgingly traded in her allegiances and worked side by side with the detective. And when they solved the case together, they shared the credit. 

Then they’d shared Alex’s bed. And the rest was history. 

But now, here she is in an NCPD uniform, while Maggie stands in a neatly tailored suit, fake FBI credentials hanging from her pocket. 

She fidgets with the brim of her cap, glancing up the corridor and then clearing her throat. “Agent Sawyer, are you going to let me in?”

“Depends,” Maggie says, easily slipping into character, standing firm and crossing her arms over her chest. “What is it that you’re after, officer?”

“I’m here on an errand from a sergeant in homicide,” Alex says, glimpsing up and down the corridor again, lest one of Maggie’s neighbours think she truly is an officer of the law come to challenge the detective. “Says you’ve got some files you need to hand over.”

“I don’t know-”

A door squeaks open three apartments up, an elderly man shuffling out. He looks at Alex for a long time, takes in her uniform, and then shuffles further out. In the painful amount of time it takes him to turn and lock his door, Alex hisses, “Please just let me in.”

“But-”

Alex shoves past her into the apartment, ignoring Maggie’s huff at her impatience. She already had to face half a dozen stares on the way up, and even had to bluff her way through a woman asking whether the police were cordoning off a street two blocks up. 

“Anyway,” Alex blows out, adjusting the heavy belt, “Continue.”

Maggie purses her lips. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“ _ She _ sent me for the files,” Alex corrects.

“Really?” Maggie challenges, flapping her jacket back to set her hands firmly on her hips.

“What? Don’t be hetronormative, Maggie.”

She watches her girlfriend press her lips firmly together before bursting out into laughter. She takes the chance to grab the lapels of Maggie’s suit jacket and tug her closer, kissing her. They steal kisses between bubbling giggles, and then Maggie eventually pushes her and falls back into character. 

“Honestly, Officer…?”

“Danvers.”

“Officer Danvers. I don’t know what  _ she _ means.” 

Alex lets her gaze wander around the apartment as if taking it in for the first time, as if she hadn’t danced around that kitchen to the sound of Maggie’s stereo, as if through that doorway, she hadn’t woken up in that bed with her lover just this morning. She treats Maggie’s apartment as suspicious new territory. 

She circles, predatory, clutching at her belt. “Sergeant Taylor wouldn’t be wrong.”

Maggie leans back against the desk she’s hovering beside, planting herself and refusing to be intimidated. “You’re very loyal to her.”

“I’m loyal to…” Alex wavers, unsure where to go next. “All my colleagues.”

“Thin blue line, huh?” Maggie blinks, falling out of the tension and tilting her head. “Wait, don’t tell me you’ve thought up a whole subplot about you sleeping with the sergeant to get a faster promotion, cause that  _ isn’t _ how the NCPD works.”

“Oh my god, no, I haven’t,” Alex admonishes, rolling her eyes. 

“If you say so.”

She hardens, stepping forward. “Are you going to be cooperative or not, Agent Sawyer?”

Dyanamite. The fuse lights. She hears it hissing. 

Maggie licks her lips. “And if I’m not?”

She eases off, leaning back, hands tightening on her belt. “Let’s not get too hasty. I’m only acting on orders from my superior officers.”

Her girlfriend’s eyes narrow, inspecting her. “This is a lion’s den for a lowly city cop like you.” Maggie prowls a step off the desk, gaining ground back. “You felt safe enough to come without back up?”

Alex pulls back, eyebrows knitting together as she imagines the dull atmosphere of the Bureau. “I would  _ never  _ say-”

“ _ Alex _ .” 

“Sorry.” She clears her throat. “If there are further escalations, appropriate actions can be taken.”

“Is that so?”

The spark fizzles along the dynamite’s fuse. Dangerous, closer. 

“If you’re trying to obstruct justice, Agent Sawyer, you’re going the right way about it.”

“Is that so, Officer Danvers?” Their voices have dropped to a point where they both seem to be speaking from deep within their belly. “I happen to be an upholder of the law.”

The sultry tempt shoots arousal straight through her like a bullet might, bleeding into her veins. The dynamite hisses, closer, almost. 

She leans down and captures Maggie’s lips with her own. Her girlfriend relents much quicker than she expected, melting against her frame and letting Alex have her spoils already. 

The dynamite blows. 

She jerks back and fists the shirt at Maggie’s hips. “I can’t think of a scenario where I’d have to search you.” She spins her, pulls off the blazer and tosses it towards the couch. Then she pulls Maggie’s frame against her. “But I’m gonna frisk you anyway.”

“Frisk me right in the middle of the Bureau?” Maggie chuckles, leaning back against her, voice raspy. “Or are we in an office?”

“You think I’m  _ thinking _ about this anymore?” 

“What about your fellow, hard-working FBI agents at the surrounding desks?”

Alex scrapes her teeth against Maggie’s ear. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t want them to watch.”

“I’ll let you do anything to me in that uniform.”

“Oh, self-fetish is it?” Alex presses her palms flat to Maggie’s stomach and roughly drags them upwards over her ribcage, enjoying the hitch in it expanding as she does so. “All about the NCPD...”

There’s a contrast between them - brilliant white on unspoiled navy. Alex frisks her, sliding over her breasts, skimming down her arms, her lower back. Gliding over the stainy texture of her pressed pants, making sure to squeeze at her shins and inner thighs on the way back up. 

“All clear?” 

Alex bites her lip at the shaky question, spinning Maggie back around to face her. She leers closer, her boots giving her another extra inch or two. 

“My brain is all mush now,” she admits, bending to press her lips into the crevice of Maggie’s jaw. “I just wanna get to the good stuff.”

Maggie’s breathing stutters as she leans back. “Go right ahead, Officer Danvers.”

The desk behind Maggie is where they’ve both spent hours pouring over documents, catching up on paperwork, booking holidays, reading the latest news headlines before they go to work in the morning. And since the first few times they’d slept together was in Alex’s territory, Maggie had gone down on her on this desk before they’d even ever reached her bed. 

Yes, Alex is fond of this desk. 

It doesn’t stop her from pushing Maggie up against it. 

She so lost in unbuttoning Maggie’s blouse and kissing her neck that she doesn’t quite notice Maggie working open her belt or navy slacks until her girlfriend goes still. She pulls back in concern, and then they both stare down at the open slacks, where an empty o-ring is now visible, strapped to her hips. 

Alex swallows, “I just- I thought- with this-” Maggie looks up, eyebrow raised. “But we don’t have to-”

Her girlfriend sits up straight and splays her legs, pulling Alex’s hips snug against her own in suggestion. “Oh, yeah we do.”

In the time it takes Alex to get a toy and lube from the toy drawer, Maggie has taken off her boots, socks and slacks, and is skirting her fingertips over her own stomach. 

“You look amazing like this, you know that?”

“You want to be where I am right now.” Alex steps between her legs, curling her grip under Maggie’s knees and tugging her right to the edge of the desk. “I’m thinking I need to convince you to join the Bureau after all.”

This had all snowballed from a single conversation. They had been bingewatching the Metropolis-set  _ Thin Blue Line _ , which included a storyline about two cops having an affair, when Maggie offhandedly admitted she had never dated within the department. She’d wondered, she said, if it would make the common pitfalls easier, having someone who understood the cruelties and demands of the job. 

Folding herself into Alex’s side, she said she was glad to be dating someone who understood the difficulty of having a relationship while navigating a career in law enforcement. Like a simple formula it had gone like this: Alex had made a jibe about being a fed, not a cop. Maggie had told her she would look hot in uniform. Alex had returned saying that sounded like a roleplay scenario. 

Two weeks later, she was sizing herself in a mock-NCPD uniform. Fixing the cap in her bathroom mirror before coming over tonight, she had been a coin-flip away from taking the whole thing off. 

Now, placing a toy and lube on the desk as Maggie wiggles off her own underwear, she’s glad she didn’t. She tips Maggie upwards by her ankles, catching her by surprise as she lands with a soft  _ oof _ on her back. Alex places her hands flat on the desk, looming over her. 

“I think you need to be warmed up, Agent Sawyer,” she says, leaning in to kiss Maggie’s neck. 

“Well, Officer Danvers, be my guest.”

Maggie’s ankles dig into her upper back as Alex goes down on her, sliding against the taunt navy uniform. The police cap is knocked off so that hands can thread into her hair. At one point Maggie curls her fingertips around the shoulder clips, pushing the fake radio out of the way to pry at her collar. 

Leaving her girlfriend keening she rises up and grabs the toy. She fixes it into the harness and slicks it with lube, catching Maggie’s ravenous gaze sweeping up and down the uniform. 

“This could have gone so much easier, Agent Sawyer,” Alex growls, pressing her fingertips into the fleshy tendons of Maggie’s thigh and spreading her wider. “You could have just cooperated.”

“This is much better,” Maggie says, shutting her eyes.

Alex soaks in the details, the starched white shirt against Maggie’s flushed skin, the clenching of her stomach in anticipation. The sound of pleasure Maggie makes as she sinks inside, so potent she curls her toes in her black boots. 

They rattle things inside the drawer with every thrust, but Maggie doesn’t seem to want her to stop. There is a headiness about this; the navy pants around her knees, the power of the uniform, the jangle of her loose belt, how Maggie’s hands fist in the back of her shirt. They writhe to a rhythm mutually set, Maggie craning her neck and bowing off the desk. 

“This feels so good,” she gasps, as Alex grips the edge of the desk above her head for leverage. 

Eventually, however, Alex feels a strain in her muscles from the angle. She moves her arms under Maggie’s lower back and scoops her up off the desk. Maggie yelps at the shift, wrapping her legs around Alex’s waist and glancing down in surprise as the toy remains inside her until Alex topples them down onto the couch. 

They scramble, tumble and jerk into several positions, each being Alex’s favourite as soon as they fall into them. She decides Maggie riding her is her favourite: sitting back on the couch, gripping her girlfriend’s hips, the navy pants down around her ankles and firmly thrusting upwards is her favourite. 

But then she decides, kneeling into the bend in the middle of the couch where it’s broken underneath as she slides into her girlfriend from behind, that this is her favourite. The filth of it, the sound of it, Maggie groaning into the arm of the couch and her own hand fisting in the back of that brilliant white shirt, drag her girlfriend back into each fluid push of her hips. 

But then, after a few alterations for kissing and comfort, she decides their final position is her favourite. After the rush for Maggie’s first orgasm, their search for the second is languid, borderline relaxed. Maggie lays back on the couch, lower back propped by the cushions, Alex sinking deeper into her. 

Their guises are long gone, FBI credentials and police cap abandoned, the two of them reverting to lovers with each soft touch. A few familiar strokes of Alex’s fingertips between her thighs, and Maggie cries out soft, hoarsely, as if the first orgasm was a scream and this one simply sings. 

Alex tucks her face into Maggie’s shoulder, half-exposed by the shirt that has survived this far. 

“My feet are so sweaty,” she complains, black boots also surviving this far. 

“Shhh,” the groggy reply comes, “You’re still inside me, let me savour it.”

Between thick black socks and her boots still on, Alex does feel twitchy as she leans up. But Maggie’s hair is fanned out flat on the couch below her even as she reaches up to place soft kisses against her lips, and Alex realises she is happy to put her own desires on hold for now. 

“When are you joining the NCPD?” Maggie asks, grinning up at her.

“When you join the FBI, Agent Sawyer.”

The satisfaction of good sex clings to everything; to skin, to leather, to clothes- 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys :) thank you so much for your feedback so far. I just wanted to warn you that there is some discussion around Earth X here, so if you want to skip it, just skip on to the next au :)

The charred stench of the bombed out airport clings to everything; to skin, to leather, to clothes. 

She surveys the scene; the blood, the bodies, the young man transitioning to a soldier quicker than the bullets which shattered his enemies’ skulls. 

“Robbie,” she says, clasping his shoulder. His body is steel-stiff, not shaking like she expected. He is stuck in that position, the shotgun still aimed. The blood soaks into the cracked tarmac. Not a muscle moves around them.

She slides her hand down to his bicep, half-embracing him. “Robbie, it’s okay. It’s done.”

At her confirmation, the shotgun drops down to hit against his knee, and he gulps in a long shuddering inhale. He salutes her, his hand trembling at his temple. The shotgun rattles in his free hand, the only other sound being the rustling of the breeze through the downed trees. 

She turns to the enraptured crowd, her soldiers. Then her eyes drop to the bodies, one crumpled over the other. She spits at their feet, then with a wave, her soldiers descend. 

Taking her leave, she sulks away from the dozens of eyes, the crowd closing in on the dispatched bodies of the Nazis who had killed Robbie’s parents six years ago. 

She reenters the gloomy corridors of the airport they had stormed and taken just two days ago. With the determined boot-steps of the other faction leader hot on her heels, she limps faster through the twisted corridors. Shafts of sunlight are breaking through the missing panels on the roof, dipping her in and out of darkness. 

She reaches the paltry room she’s claimed as her office. It is an old customs room, with a map on the wall, a cot and a desk with her scrawled notes all over it. She leaves the door open; her lover likes the dramatic effect of slamming it behind her. 

Two factions of their rebellion had joined to storm this airport and take it as a command post. All over the country, they were gaining ground. She led one faction to victory. 

Captain Sawyer - pain in her ass, love of her life, the poison that both kept her lucid and made her writhe in agony all at once - led the other. 

“What the hell?” Sawyer seethes.

“What?” Alex snaps, not looking up from the notes she rearranges on her desk. 

“Why’d you do that for?”

“Do what?”

“You know what.” Sawyer paces back and forth behind her. “He’s too young-”

“We were doing worse younger.”

She hated letting Robbie do it, but he insisted he be the one to take his revenge on the Nazi officials. Six years ago, they had been local law enforcers, had come to his family’s farm, and killed his parents for suspected treason. She had taken him in at 13, raised him in this resistance movement, and when presented with the Recon intelligence that told her that the airport they were planning to attack had two members of staff she might be interested in, she gave him the choice on what he wanted done with them should their campaign be successful. 

She had given him a gun, taught him how to shoot it, and he refused. He wanted to kill them with his father’s hunting rifle, and she allowed it. 

In full view of the two factions, he had avenged his mother and father. 

“God, are you just that dead inside-”

Alex spins, holding out her hand. “Don’t start on this.”

Sawyer shakes her head, but Alex can’t take the shame, the pity, the lethal concoction of emotions that swirls around their every interaction. 

Whatever they are to each other, she didn’t think they deserved to be called lovers. 

Alex maintains focus on her notes, her plans. Every day calculated, every ration counted, every inch of ground they gained consolidated. She glances up at the map, seeing the pins she had put there and hopes to move forward with the information trickling back from recon missions- 

“Are you ever gonna let me in?” 

Soft, tender. Seductively so. It’s almost lost in the click of the door closing. This gentle approach is almost more shocking than the door being slammed.

Alex wants to let her knees go weak, to turn and find comfort in Sawyer’s arms. The cost of this war is her humanity and hope, ebbing away with every kill, every loss, every footstep. 

But she can’t. That isn’t what they are to each other. 

She doesn’t reply. Instead, she reaches up and adjusts the bent angle of a red pin. She sinks it further into the drywall, imagining that if Sawyer sank it into a chamber of her heart it would feel better than this. 

“God, Alex, when you almost died I thought-”

“What?” Alex curls her hands into fists and plants them on the desk, spitting down onto the paper beneath her. She doesn’t want to hear this, but her mouth speaks without her permission. “You thought what?”

Sawyer’s expression flattens. “I thought things would be different.”

“Things  _ are _ different.”

“You almost died-”

She throws her arms into the air, her gnarled scars pulling with the movement, her notes scattering onto the dusty floor. “I was  _ supposed _ to die, don’t you remember? I was  _ supposed _ to.” 

That crippling fear, the one she stomached in order to march to the death that never came, resurges inside. But she refuses to be weakened, even as her voice tightens to a shrill siren. “It was a suicide mission, we all knew it. I wasn’t supposed to come back, but I did!”

It was simple at the time; go to Kara, kill her. Alex failed. 

They were both supposed to die in an unstable Kryptonite suicide bomb, but it didn’t detonate as it should have. Neither of them had died. And Kara made her pay for it, tortured her with heatvision, seared her skin, left her hanging by her wrists until she blistered, grew irritated, infected, to the brink of death. Then their physicians patched her up, healed her, all so Kara could have the sadistic pleasure of repeating the cycle over again. 

She’d been tossed out of the back of a cattle truck and left to die on the side of the road. She’d begged for death, wheezing on the dark country lane, flies buzzing to get at her. But a neighbouring faction had found her, and she’d been stretchered back to her camp. 

She had failed. She hadn’t died. The ugly, mottled way her body healed proved that. And when the regime came down so hard on the Resistance, hunting them like a dog hunts rats and wrings their necks in the dry hay, they had almost been snuffed out. Alex blames herself for that, still. 

But then they’d gotten reports from Schott’s division that strangers from another world had blown the possibilities wide open. She’d never met him before, only heard of him, but the first time they met, he bowed his head and told her that it was  _ her _ from another world who had helped give them the first pure taste of hope. 

Yet even that, envisioning a version of herself as a hero that had taken on the  Führer ’s wife and helped to destroy her after all, wasn’t enough to staunch the pain of her gruelling trauma. It wasn’t instant, but it was relived day by day. 

Anger laces itself like venom into each of the words she throws out. “Don’t ever think for a second that I forget the smell of my own burning flesh, and the agony she put me through. If I hadn’t weakened her, I’d have been subject to even worse torture.”

Outside, the burning of corpses has begun. A single bass drumbeat thumps, thumps, thumps. On the third beat, the crack of a snare. The smoke hazes the room, filtering in through the cracked windows. Alex rips up her shirt, showing the wrinkled, crimson patches of skin which never fully healed, the testament of the cost of survival. 

Brazen, Sawyer reaches out to touch the scars. The cracking snare, thumping drum between them. With another snap - their eyes meet, and they fall into each other, with teeth and nails and this violent love they make to each other. 

Crack. 

Alex grunts, shoving Sawyer against the wall with the map, the shafts of light through the window guiding her way. 

Crack. 

She wrenches Sawyer’s belt open, awkwardly leaning on her weaker leg. A button, a fly, and then she finds Sawyer as hot and wet as ever. The noise clawing its way from the Captain’s throat used to make her worry she’d hurt her, but now she knows through experience that that’s exactly what her fellow fighter craves. 

That burn, that stretch, enough to make it hurt and take them out of this place. Alex tries to do that for herself. Tries to focus on the scratch of denim and damp cotton against the back of her hand, the sharp tug of Sawyer’s hands in her hair, teeth against her throat. 

But this time is different. This time it doesn’t work. She’s still here, with this woman, in this office, after this trauma. 

She pushes her nose into Sawyer’s hair, but the peaty smell of the fire from outside has permeated the air. She can hear the drumbeats even as she fucks faster, as she bites at Sawyer’s nipples to make her squirm and pant. She can still see Robbie’s bearly-hidden terror as he faced those who had murdered his parents. 

Even when Sawyer is coming, when her orgasm forces them closer and she’s gripping at Alex’s wrist, that escape they usually force themselves into doesn’t come, and she’s still standing there, her fingers inside this other woman, who’s gasping into her neck. 

“Danvers?” Sawyer whispers, more tender than Alex has ever heard her, more than they’ve ever afforded each other. “Alex, uh, are you-?”

She cuts off with a sigh as Alex slides her fingers free and leans back. Even in the smokey light, she notices a thousand details she never did before. The youthfulness of Sawyer’s features underneath the scowl of war, the way her lips part from their bruising kisses, the colour of her eyes in the sunset, how single silver hairs are beginning to root through. 

Alex staggers back on her weaker leg, catching herself on the edge of her desk. 

“Danvers?”

Still, the drumbeat continues outside. Faster, almost, as if they haven’t been able to properly keep tempo. She smells the flesh now, dead and burning. She remembers the jangle of the chains she hung from, her screams as Kara tortured her. Her own flesh scalding away. 

The cot’s blankets are pulled away, bundled around the end as she left it this morning. 

“Come here,” Alex says suddenly, “Lay down with me.”

Sawyer hesitates. Leaning against the wall, her jeans still open, she flickers from the cot to Alex with suspicion. This is not what they are to each other, this is not what they do. But Alex begins to be vulnerable first; she bars the door, strips off, and then lays on the cot. 

After a few beats of consideration, Sawyer strips down to her tank and underwear, and joins her on the cot. She stares at the ceiling, tense as a plank of wood. She jumps when Alex runs a socked foot up her calf. 

“What is this?” Sawyer asks, coarse and rough. The words like sandpaper against Alex’s ears, raising goosebumps. 

Outside, the drill sergeant from Alex’s faction is shouting orders at their soldiers. Through a crack in the wall, they hear the thudding footsteps outside of marching. Alex traces the insignia on her bicep, the bear with its jowls swinging and its teeth bared for war. They all bear the tattoos of the resistance, but she’s never taken the time to study Sawyer’s.

She remembers the innocence being chipped away in Robbie’s eyes day by day, the last of it shot dead with the might of his own vengeance.

She can’t take this anymore. 

“This scares me.”

Sawyer scoffs. “Nothing scares you.”

“This does.”

“Us?” At Alex’s nod, she softens. “Why?”

Lying on that dirt road and begging for death, she had wanted Sawyer-  _ Maggie _ \- to know that in another life, she would have loved her, did love her as much as she could with whatever heart this conflict had left. The war had cleaved her open, but if there was anything left that she didn’t bleed out, it was for Maggie. 

“Because I think I-” She shudders, palming against her own scars. “I think I might love you.”

“You love me?” Maggie shifts on her side, eyes wide. “You dont think I’m a bad person?”

Crumpling together, limbs entwined, Alex rests her forehead against Maggie’s. “Actually I always thought you were perfect, it’s nice to see you have problems too.”

The drill sergeant finishes his orders, the marching of the boots halt. There is only the faint crackle of the flaming pyre. 

She brushes her thumb along the flush still high on Maggie’s cheek. “I’m sorry we do this to each other.”

“Maybe we should stop,” Maggie suggests, placing a hand on Alex’s hip and thumbing at the bone, as if embedding her thumbprint. “And try to be something else.”

“I don’t know if we can be anything else.”

“With the way things are changing…” Maggie glances up at the map on the wall. “Maybe we can.”

They aren’t trying to get their hopes up, but they know there’s a tide turning. The chances are they just might not make it out alive. 

Maggie has a shaved patch on her head from where she got split by debris and had to get stitches. The hair is beginning to grow back, but Alex plays with the fuzz behind her ear. 

“You know, I’ve been roaming for a long time. And hiding for even longer.” Alex whispers her words between the pounding of her heart against her breastbone louder than drums had thumped outside. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a home.”

Maggie shakes her head. “I don’t remember what it feels like.”

“I forgot, too,” she admits, “But my home is with you.”

And most wonderful thing, worth the bullets, the blood, the bombs and the bodies; Maggie blossoms into a smile, so rarely seen. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” As if this naive and innocent moment was contagious, Alex smiles back. “I’m home-”

~

“I’m home!”

At the honeyed voice, Alex wakes slowly. She keeps her eyes closed through the shutting of the front door, the keys clinking into their bowl, the clicks of heels thrown off, the coat whispering onto the rack. 

It’s only at the final step of the routine, the padding of feet into their living room, that she opens her eyes.

Her wife approaches, blouse, hair, make-up and smile still immaculate despite the day she has put in. She perches beside Alex’s knee, bathed like a saint under the skylight.

“How was court?” Alex asks. 

Making an annoyed sound, Maggie leans down, kisses her, and murmurs, “More importantly, how are you? You had surgery until 2, right?”

“Yup.” Alex shifts higher on the couch, rubbing at the back of her neck. “Your daughter is making standing for long periods of time very difficult.” She moves her hand to her stomach, swollen at 6 months. “Unfortunately, that is a large part of my job.”

Maggie covers her hand, rubbing her thumb over the back of Alex’s knuckles. “Well, maybe you need to lay off a little. You’re working hard. Save your strength.”

“Lay off?” Alex flops back, limp. “Tell that to my schedule.”

She was afforded one more kiss, then her wife slinked over to their kitchen. They had chosen this house for its open plan and airy, light spaces. She got the full benefit now, able to keep observing Maggie and love her idiosyncrasies from afar as she reached into the cupboard for a mug. 

“I’ll be away all day tomorrow,” Maggie calls over her shoulder, filling her mug in the sink, “You gonna be okay on your own?”

Alex rolls her head onto the armrest. “I was a neurosurgeon  _ before _ I was pregnant, you know this, right?”

“Of course.”

Maggie collects her briefcase on her loop back into their living room, settling down into the armchair at an angle to the couch. For the next ten minutes, Alex fielded a text or two from her sister about the progress of her pregnancy, and then lay contently, watching her wife work. 

The way she tucks her hair behind her ear, chews on her lower lip in concentration, always reminds Alex of their beginning. She had been a medical student, wet behind the ears, and Maggie had been brought in with a sprain from running. The injured jogger had hedged her bets and asked her cute doctor out, but Alex had flushed and rushed through an explanation of how it was extremely unethical to date patients. 

(Especially patients of the same sex). 

Yet almost 8 months later, Maggie was a junior prosecutor in a medical negligence case in which Alex was interviewed by the DA’s office and asked to testify against a colleague. When the trial finished, all the regrets Alex had harboured about not going after that woman were put right. 

And a decade later, here they were. 

Whether or not it was the cocktail of hormones that made the loneliness of the last few hours spin in her mind, Alex gestures at Maggie and wiggles her fingers, which progresses to grabbing motions. “Come talk to her.”

Maggie puts her laptop aside, and while she looks amused, by now she has learned better than to question her wife in this state. She alights on the edge of the couch by Alex’s hip. “What do you want me to say?”

“You should practise for when she’s born.”

“Practise my stern voice?”

“Yeah.”

Maggie reaches out and carefully rubs the bump. She leans down and speaks to it, “Your mommy is a very accomplished neurosurgeon and she would appreciate it if you allowed her to continue doing her six hour surgeries without any pain.”

Alex smirks at the skylight above her. “Maybe your other mommy could be convinced to give more foot rubs.”

“Hey, that’s pushing it.”

They laugh, and then Alex shuffles over. Gingerly, Maggie climbs down onto the couch with her, and when she grows impatient with being treated like she was made of glass, Alex yanks her wife in closer. 

They lie like that for a few minutes, watching the light fading and returning, dimming with the pass of clouds and then peeking back out to fill their living room with vibrancy. 

She traces patterns between in Maggie’s shoulder blades. “You know, I had this horrible thought today.”

“Oh yeah?” 

“What if I go into labour when you’re stuck in a trial?”

Maggie leans up on her elbow, eyebrows knitted together. “Don’t you dare.”

Indignant, Alex waves at her bump. “Tell her, not me.”

Sitting up, Maggie cups the bump once more. “This is your mom. If you’re thinking of coming out when I’m not there, don’t.” She wags a finger, as if in court. “You hold on until I get to you, okay?”

They share a laugh and then Maggie settles back down against her side, caressing Alex’s stomach. They’d planned this child with precision; who would carry, how they would go through the stages of artificial insemination, at what point in their careers they would be ready to take this step. 

But now, with all the regimental rigor stripped away, the human experience was bleeding in with every milestone. Their fears, hopes, and surprises. Laying on a couch, her wife gently stroking the taunt skin of her stomach, the sun flooding in through the skylight, it was more real than the insemination procedure, than the pregnancy test, the morning sickness, when she started showing. 

She supposes this crossroads between her clinical mind and her human experience was when she got her first scan. After working for a decade surrounded by hospitals and medicine, she was uncomfortable being on the other side, being reduced to a patient, more or less. The OBGYN department knew her well so they treated her with respect and a more medicalised approach to their language, for which she was grateful.

And yet the moment she heard that whoosh of the doppler effect, heard her baby’s heartbeat, there was nothing clinical in her emotions. She had heard that sound a thousand times for a thousand women, and none of it had prepared her for hearing it that day. 

Alex pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and covers them both. Maggie lets out a noise of protest, but doesn’t move. Instead, she softly lays an arm over the curve of Alex’s stomach, and relaxes into her wife’s embrace. 

“I need to work,” Maggie mumbles, muffled into Alex’s shoulder.

“You need to spend time with your wife and daughter.”

“...Okay.” 

Continuing to trace patterns over Maggie’s shoulder blades, she looks over at the mug abandoned by the laptop. It says  _ World’s Best Surgeon _ , a gift from Maggie when she was accepted into her speciality. That mug has lasted through two apartments, this house, their marriage, and now this next stage of their lives together. 

She imagines that mug being used for strong coffees when they’ve suffered through a sleepless night with a newborn, or chai tea when Maggie gets another landmark case and needs to decompress at home. 

She remembers when they’d moved in together, it was filled to the brim with cheap red wine as they shared a bare mattress in their new, albeit empty, apartment. They turned a novelty mug into a celebratory chalice from which they both drank. 

And now, its presence surges a cocktail of emotion through her. 

She turns to whisper into Maggie’s hairline. “I’m craving you, you know.”

Maggie huffs, ready to lift the blanket. “What weird food combination do you-”

“No, I mean it.” Alex circles her wrist and draws her hand away from the blanket, holding it aloft over them as she shifts to look into her wife’s eyes. “I’m craving  _ you _ .”

In their early days, Alex and Maggie couldn’t believe the intimacy they had with being together. It was 24-hour diners and all-night cafes, those days when they were scraping together dates between double shifts at the hospital or battling her trial rota. 

In fact, they’d been sleeping together in flits; in the on call room, on the couch in Maggie’s office, Alex coming around in the middle of the day to her apartment when Maggie had a day off. 

The first night they actually spent together was magical. They even spent most of it talking in the moonlight, sharing vulnerabilities they hadn’t with any lover before. 

When they finally stabilised their working schedules and eventually moved in together, Alex had been worried that maybe a lot of their spark came from the excitement of catching each other between tightly packed, pressurized schedules. But that wasn’t true, their intimacy only deepened with the passing of the years. 

She’s aware her hormones are in a flux, but she’s been with Maggie for almost a decade, and how much they’ve grown together hits her all of a sudden.

Maggie kisses her jaw as the tears spill over her cheeks. 

“Babe?” she says, “Are you okay?”

“It’s so stupid I just-” Alex looks again at that mug by the laptop, the years spanning between them. Behind them and in front of them. And yet they’re perfectly encapsulated in this moment. “I’m thinking about how happy I am that you’re my wife, that we’ve been together all this time, and how much we’ve changed together.”

Maggie leans over her wife, thumbing at her tears. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Alex feels another surge, the dissonant mist of her pregnancy hormones descending once again. She kisses Maggie, whispering, “I want you.”

Maggie had never been one to let her suffer, nor question any plea. She nods, pressing her lips down again against Alex’s, who lays plaint on the couch pillows. Alex guides the wrist she still holds down, and Maggie’s hand slips easily past the elastic waistband of her maternity pyjamas.

Alex isn’t ashamed of the desire Maggie finds there, not least because they’ve been together for so long. The easy slip of fingertips over sensitive nerves has her gripping the armrest by her ear, her other hand still loosely clinging to Maggie’s wrist. She doesn’t need anything over than this, a smooth rhythm over pulsing heat. 

Maggie murmurs against her jaw, neck, chin. Whispers against her lips, licks at her tongue. This woman has stalked across courtroom floors like a predator, yet was reduced to a flood of tears at their wedding. This woman has held her when she lost patients, missed opportunities, has shared her own frustrations at the justice system and still got up to fight every single day. 

This woman has been with her for a decade and still touches her with the reverence of the beginning, still kisses with the want and passion of those nights in the on call room at National City General. 

Alex loves this woman, who breathes pet names and encouragements against her neck, who nuzzles in even as Alex squirms and cries out and sweats. 

Maggie has seen her caked in other people’s blood and bodily fluids after a harrowing surgery, has been with her through the stress of their initial conception efforts ending with a short-time positive and the realisation that miscarriage was not just something she witnessed as an intern on an ER rotation. 

“Right there-”

But Maggie knows already, focuses her efforts, her pace, until ecstasy overrides the hormones, the memories, the triumphs and failures they’ve shared. She spreads her legs wider and pushes up into Maggie’s touch, gripping her wrist. 

Still trembling from orgasm, she feels the warmth of her wife’s breath on her neck, and sighs in contentment. 

~

He could feel his lover’s breath, hot on the back of his neck. Fingers interlaced with his, curled around the headboard. 

“Harder,” he huffs.

An affirming grunt and his request met; another hand warm around him, stroking heat through his belly and sending him spinning, spiralling until pleasure bursts. 

He floats back to reality just to register the satisfied groan muffled against his shoulder, and then together they slump forward. He struggles to catch his breath, pleasure thickening now in his veins and making him drunk with it. 

His lover places a gentle kiss between his shoulder blades, carefully pulling out and away from him. He sinks forward onto the pillows, inhaling the scent of detergent as the other man puffs out a long breath and falls flat on his back. 

He reaches out and runs a fingertip through the sweat along his companion’s collarbone. “Are you gonna make me sleep in the wet patch, again?”

His lover laughs, that rich baritone that he’s found he’s craving more often than not. “If it was so bad the other times, you should’ve thought twice about ripping my clothes off.”

“Touche,” he admits, falling into those brown eyes he has grown so fond of. He dances his fingertips down over his boyfriend's adam's apple, marvelling at how free it feels to finally be here in this bed with this man. How long it took him to get comfortable with who he is, what he wanted. 

"I love you," he says softly, still shy about expressing that depth of feeling. 

His lover softens, reaching out to comb through his hair. "I love you, too." 

"We've been together almost a year, you know that?" 

His boyfriend considers this, and then, "Could've been longer if you'd come out of the closet."

"Marco," he growls, shoving against his shoulder.

The journey had been difficult, the rocks cutting into his feet with every step until at certain moments, he bled and bled and wasn’t sure if he could carry on.

Alexander knew he’d been gay as soon as he hit puberty, but when his adopted alien brother grew into a tall, strapping blonde jock, he was ashamed to shown any sign of weakness in comparison. Even if Kal is a loveable dude, Alexander knew he had to be the toughest big brother, to not show any perceived cracks in his armour. 

That didn’t make for a particularly happy existence. He’d spent high school hiding in his dead mother’s study, curled away and weak simply because Victor had finally got laid by a cheerleader and was encouraging him to do the same. And his college years were spent closing his eyes and thinking about the girls’ male friends, until he couldn’t stomach putting himself through it anymore. 

He’d loathed himself, partied and drank away the pain, the shame. He lacked the strength to either put himself out of his misery, or come out and live openly after all, and so he did neither, choosing to numb the pain instead. It didn’t help that he never lived up to his father’s standards. Eric Danvers was much more interested in Kal’s budding journalism career than his first born son. 

And eventually, J’oanna rescued him from the depths of that despair, trained him up as an agent, and gave him a purpose in life. 

It just so happened then that he met Marco on the hot airport tarmac; working, proud, strong, handsome. He knew right away what this was, that tug, and tried to smother it like he had with the rest of the times he’d felt that way.

But Marco called him out and finally,  _ finally _ , after 28 years, Alexander stumbled out of the closet. As awful as he felt when Marco turned him down, he’d been free, finally; able to tell Eric, his father, who told him there was nothing to be afraid of, and Kal, who loved him and just wanted his big brother to be happy. And he was proud to come out, his chest swelling with pride as he finally confessed to the part of himself he’d tried so hard to bury. 

Getting to be with Marco, though, that was the golden ticket. 

There had been bumps of course; spending Valentine’s day in nothing but tight,  _ tight _ shorts and a bowtie only for Marco to tell him about his father beating him and tossing him to the street to live with an uncle. Running into Emmett after tai chi class and having him particularly nasty about past mistakes. And almost dying in the tank without getting to tell a man-  _ his lover _ \- that he loved him. 

They’re in that groggy, drowsy lull after sex, snuggling closer. Alexander flings an arm around Marco’s stomach and knows he is going to hold Marco to the fact that when they got a dog, they were gonna name it George. 

And then the worst sound - Marco’s cell phone buzzing on the nightstand. 

“No,” he groans.

“Ignore it,” Alexander mumbles. 

“Yeah, you’d be saying that if it was the DEO.” Marco leans up, checks the ID, and then huffs, “Damn, SciDiv consult.”

“Consult?”

“I was on call, remember?”

“I don’t know…” Alexander burrows into the warm sheets left behind as Marco slides out of bed. “You did a pretty good job of making me forget everything.” 

Marco snorts at that, pulling open the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. Alexander just about rouses himself, inching up on his elbows and watching his boyfriend make a face at a pair of boxers he finds.

“Seriously, Alex, how do you wear these?” he mutters, adjusting the waistband.

“I told you, they’re more practical for my combat uniform,” Alexander complains, flopping forward again. “And they make your butt look amazing.” 

His boyfriend pads around the bed, dressing in what he can locate from their race to bed. Alexander watches until Marco goes out of his eyeline, and then sighs, tracing the crease in the pillow which Marco’s head left. Satisfied, and yet ruffled by impending absence, he gets up and follows Marco into the bathroom. 

He takes Marco’s terrycloth robe from the back of the bathroom door, ropes the front of it and then scowls at his boyfriend brushing his teeth. 

“You say  _ my _ clothing is skimpy,” he complains, exaggerating where the robe ends just above his knee. 

Marco wiggles his eyebrows at the revealing length, chuckling through toothpaste at the ridiculous sight. Alexander rolls his eyes and make his way out to the kitchen to grab the watering can from the draining board and fill it. 

He is watering their litter of bonsai trees when Marco swaggers over, buttoning his shirt and fixing his cuffs. 

“I have you well trained,” he muses, pulling at the back of the cloth belt and hugging Alexander from behind. 

“You don’t need DEO observation?” Alexander asks, setting the can down on the shelf.

“Nah, should be a one hour job, max,” Marco answers, kissing the back of his neck. 

Yawning, Alexander retreats back to the bed, drops the robe and returns to the heat. Marco follows with a cheeky smile and kneels on the bed, bearing over his boyfriend. “As good as you look pacing a scene, it would be a waste of your time being there.”

Alexander pouts. “But I do make good arm candy.” 

Marco leans down to kiss him. Then he moves away to straighten his shirt and grab his keys. “I shouldn’t be too long if it’s just a consult.”

“I’ll wait up for you, if you want.”

“Please, like you don’t fall asleep two minutes after sex.” Marco clips his badge onto his belt and slides his phone into his pocket. “I’m surprised you aren’t already out.”

Yawning again on cue and stretching out like a cat in the sheets, Alexander mumbles, “Detective Sawyer, you flatter me.”

Sniggering under his breath, Marco trots down the steps from the bed and makes his way to the door. “See you soon.”

“Mmmm…”

Alexander was blissfully asleep by the time the door shut. 

~

She contemplated sleep, but she knows by now to trust her lover.

Even in the meagre light of the moon, she can see the snowy caps of the mountains and the silhouettes they leave against the night sky. The fireplace snaps in a rhythm so smooth it could be trying to communicate with her. 

She rolls the sleeves of her white blouse up further, glancing at the gold watch on her wrist. It is earlier than the regular times of these visits, but the jetlag weighs heavily on her bones. She needs the type of pleasure that begins like a slow infectious heat, thickening the blood and sweeping through the host, delivering them from golden pleasure straight into their slumber. 

She wonders how the request would go over with her lover, who already teased her that she was so worn down from her work that she fell asleep too quickly after sex. 

She smirks, moving to the side table and unstopping the crystal decanter. She pours first one, then two fingers of scotch, enjoying the glug of the amber liquid splashing into the glasses. 

Finally, the knock. 

Alex savours the first sip of scotch, knowing her lover likes the taste of it on her tongue. Then she moves to the door, opening it and peering out into the hotel’s dimly lit hallway. 

“Ambassador,” her guest says evenly.

Alex doesn’t speak at first, running her gaze down the deliciously domestic outfit her lover has chosen; hair tousled, tartan flannel rolled at the elbows and hanging around her blue denim jeans. 

“Ms Sawyer,” she eventually returns, focusing on the way the denim hugged hips she hopes to grip as they kiss. The muscle memory wells up; those hips bare under her palms as she lowers her mouth between Maggie’s legs. “The hour’s pretty late.”

“It is, but I just thought I should check on my favourite client, make sure she’s settling in alright.”

Alex widens the door, but doesn’t move. “Client?”

Maggie swaggers closer, so they are toe to toe. “My  _ favourite _ client.”

“Ah.”

She tilts her head, glancing at Alex’s lips, their cat and mouse game almost at its close. “Anything else I can do to make your stay satisfactory?”

“Well, there is one thing.” She catches Maggie’s wrist and tugs her inside. 

The hotel manager makes quick work of pushing Alex up against the door to close it. They kiss, hot, desperate, trying to claw back the distance since the last time they were together. 

“God, I missed you,” Alex murmurs, lost in their passion. 

“Why did you stay away so long this time?”

She doesn’t resist hands on her blouse buttons, snaking down her belly to unclip her belt. Maggie often teases her about her foreign dress - blouse from France, belt a crisp leather from Egypt, underwear right here from the USA. 

This room is their sanctuary - locked away from her life of bureaucracy. When she sits thousands of miles away in her quarters in the embassy, she curses the vodka in her glass for not being scotch and thinks of this room. Vodka is cool, emotionless; scotch puts fire in her belly and reminds her of the nights she has spent with this woman in that bed. 

Everything about her affair with Maggie has subverted the expectations she held of life and what it meant to live it. The nights they shared took every sheet of paper, every treaty, every email agreement and shredded it. She has shaken hands with politicians and with those same hands has learned to climb up a woman’s inner thighs. The many exotic tastes she has experienced could not match licking the salty sweat from the fleshy juncture above Maggie’s collarbone after orgasm. 

She remembers after their first time, returning to her office in Russia. She had opened the windows and let the frosty Moscow air gnaw at her bones and whistle through her ribs, a new being. 

And now, with Maggie sinking down to her knees, she forgets that office, that job, that duty. There is just her underwear being pulled down her thighs, Maggie’s dark eyes almost black, even in the dancing firelight. 

As a diplomat representing the United States, she has seen all the world could offer. Yet with Maggie’s tongue working around and against her clit and turning her blood to liquid gold, she knows that no expense, no riches, nothing from any corner or culture or royalty on the globe, could match this luxury. Her stomach clenches, her head craning back against the maghony door, panting out her release, reducing all she has known before to worthlessness. 

Later, together, they’re laying in the bed. Maggie scowls at a chip on the headboard, “This one is custom made.”

Drowsy with jetlag and the afterglow, Alex grumbles, “Custom made and no space for handcuffs.

Maggie snorts, dropping her arm between them. “I thought you were pretty happy with the four poster arrangement.”

Closing her eyes, Alex grins. Two days after that particular occasion she had hosted a Russian delegation in Washington, unable to concentrate on anything except the phantom pull of silk around her wrists and ankles, pleasure looping through her stomach.

Maggie shifts beside her, propping up and dipping her pillow. She fixes a serious expression on her, which prompts Alex to ask, "What?"

Initially, Maggie shakes her head, as if refusing to answer. Then she sighs, admitting what she has been wrestling with. “You probably have women all over the world.”

In all her travels, in the time Alex has spent getting to know who she is for sure, there hasn’t been another woman who has her heart like this one. 

Alex licks her lips. “There’s just you.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

But Maggie’s voice hitches, betraying her vulnerability, and Alex chooses it as her opening. 

“I’m being moved to Germany.”

Maggie’s eyebrows rise at the announcement. “Wow. That’s a change.”

“It is. It’s a whole different country.” Like a shot of adrenaline, her grogginess is gone, and Alex pushes up to her elbow. “Come with me.”

One blink, another, then. “What?”

“Please, Maggie, come with me.” Blindly, Alex pats the sheets between them until she clasps Maggie’s hand. “I know I haven’t been in the friendliest postings since we’ve been together, but we could really make a go of it.”

She watches the working of Maggie’s mouth, the way she frowns as if this concept was not one she has ever entertained. “Alex…”

“A gay ambassador in Berlin?” Alex says, rushing back in, “People won’t even bat an eyelash.”

It occurs to her in this frantic moment that this notion, this  _ want _ , has been buried deep down in her subconscious, ticking away like a background process. This isn’t spur of the moment, this ask was a long time coming, waiting for the situation to ripen. And now, with her new post, it is ready to pick from the vine. 

She hopes this will taste sweet, not bitter. 

Maggie swallows, looking at each of the four corners of the canvas above them, as if choosing a direction from a map. “Alex, would we really work, out of this?”

It started as pure curiosity. After an arduous introduction to her post in Russia, she chose to spend the initial few days of her visit home far away from anyone connected to her life; away from family, colleagues. Anything she knew. She chose a state she had never been too, a luxury resort high in the mountains, owned by a woman who appreciated the healthy tips and valued the custom of minding her own business. 

She liked it, and continued to revisit there, using it as respite over the next seven years as she rose through the diplomatic ranks under her friend and mentor, Mr J’onzz. And that would have been the end of it, except the more she frequented the resort, the friendlier she became with the owner. 

As the harsh wind blew its icy breath against the window, Alex and Maggie’s connection thawed, and they became as friendly as two adults can be when there is money involved. 

One night, as they sat in front of the fire in the main lounge sharing a bottle of scotch long after the other patrons had gone to bed, that friendliness shifted. Alex had been ranting about human rights abuses she had seen on her travels, attitudes towards homosexuality, not understanding why that affected her so much. Maggie had made a sour comment, and with the effects of alcohol and good company distorting her inhibitions, she started down a line of questioning about ‘gay lifestyles’.

Maggie eventually shrugged her off by telling her she had a lot of questions, and that they should turn in for the night. But Alex lay awake, and was awake through many nights as she returned to Europe, the can of worms well and truly open, wiggling and alive. 

On her next visit to the lodge, she told Maggie she wanted answers, and with three winter nights spent keeping each other warm, she got them.

And so began their affair. Alex gave her an encrypted phone, telling her to be careful because after all, she was sleeping with a diplomat. A few days every two or three months, Alex would visit her family in California and then return to the resort. 

They spent a week together once, in the summertime. They went for leisurely walks around the lake, in the forest, they even considered fishing. In the winter they skied together, and Alex told her about slopes in France, Switzerland, South Korea. 

But she wants more. She wants it all. 

“We won’t know unless we try,” she says.

They’ve known each other for seven years, been lovers for four, and yet now Maggie looks at her as if she was a stranger. “You’re asking me to take a huge gamble.”

“I know.” Alex pulls their interlaced fingers up and kisses over Maggie’s knuckles. “I know, but I am.”

The fire is dying down now, unstoked by the lovers. In the growing dimness, Alex clings to whatever features she can still make out, her desperation mounting. 

“Trial it. Come for a few weeks, and if you hate it, we can end this.” She feels caged in the four poster by the very thought. “But it would break my heart. I…"

She trails off, unsure if she can make this leap if Maggie was going to refuse her. 

But the prompt comes. “You?”

She has faced down lap dogs for despots, war lords, met royalty and snakes. She has fought for her country as much as she could with words and handshakes. Had the sword of Damocles wavering over her head on numerous occasions. 

And yet this tender moment, lying in bed with a woman she has just made love to, is the encounter that petrifies her the most.

"I love you, Maggie Sawyer.”

Fireworks spark in Maggie’s eyes as she registers the words, welling up with tears

“I love you too, Alex Danvers.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes when I’m away,” Alex whispers, her voice choked, her confessions unstopped, “I can see our lives…”

“Me too. It’s full and rich and -” Maggie chews at her lower lip, inching closer as if she wants to keep the information between their bodies, away from the world, “I’ve let myself imagine it. Travelling with you to all of these places.”

“We could have a first vacation.”

“A first fight.”

“A lifetime of firsts.”

Maggie kisses her at that prospect. “How much time do I have? To make the decision.”

“We have the whole weekend.” 

“I’d have to leave this place,” Maggie says, leaning back and viewing the room like she is memorising in the detail of the fire, the scotch, the wallpaper. 

“But with the money you’d make with a sell, you could buy somewhere in Berlin,” Alex says, “Build it from scratch again. Make another tourist trap.”

Maggie’s anecdotes about buying a run-down hotel on a hill and helping to fund, build, repair and decorate with her own financial juggling is one of Alex’s favourite stories. She told it the second night they’d consummated their secret relationship, lying in Alex’s arms in a blanket in front of the fire. A story of resilience, passion, determination, and an unrelenting desire to see her task through. 

Staring into the snapping flames, Alex realised she was accepting of being conquered by such an extraordinary woman. 

“I’ll think about it.”

Alex kisses her and kisses her. The clock ticking in her mind, counting down to when she would have to fly to Washington and then Germany never began. 

They have all the time in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all who are following :) I hope you're enjoying. Let me know.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading along :) I'm sorry there was a delay.

There is never enough time in the day.

With a sigh, Alex pulls the white sheet back over the man’s head - or whatever was left of it. Chunks and fleshy tabs cling to collapsed bone. Only the hairline, ears and jutting jaw let her know for sure that there had once been a face there. 

The crime is sure to cause a stir. It is already causing a buzz on social media, various theories gaining traction and fingers being pointed before the police have even formally opened their investigation. A business man bludgeoned to death in a shadier district of the city would whet anyone’s appetite. 

A whoosh of someone coming through the lab’s entrance. Without looking up from her clipboard she announces, “I’ll be with you in one minute.”

“One minute? After the treat I got last night, that seems a little cold.”

Alex spins at the familiar voice. She props her perspex goggles on her head and lays her clipboard on a side table. “Maggie?”

Detective Sawyer puts her hands in her jacket pockets, grinning. “Case has been transferred to me.”

All morning as she stood between blinding floodlights, flashing cameras and whirring technicians, Alex had wanted to put down her equipment and climb back into bed with the woman she’d spent the night with. They’d been dating for a few weeks but friends a long time before that, and finally that bond they shared had culminated in a night of passion she didn’t want to end. 

But when she was the medical examiner on call, she couldn’t refuse to go when a body dropped. 

“Upgraded, huh?”

Maggie suppresses a smile, wandering closer to the table with the white sheet. “Well he was a prominent businessman. A donor to Mayor Wilkins” 

Alex whistles, thinking back to this morning when she squatted down in a rat-infested alleyway, the stench of urine and burning in the air. “No wonder he got bludgeoned.”

Maggie comes closer, as if pulled in by the body, and examines the corpse’s right hand, still poking out from beneath the sheet. She tucks some hair behind her ear and leans in to inspect closer, and Alex’s breath catches. 

She remembers kissing over the shell of that ear, tracing down that neck, and discovering the skin now safe from her wandering eye. 

Just last night, they’d finally gone to bed together. Even now, the chemicals of the lab remind her of those first murders they’d closed together when Maggie was still working homicide. They’d been fond friends, working side by side every day in alleyways, by the docks, in the rough neighbourhoods. 

But then Maggie was transferred and promoted up to Major Crimes, and they didn’t see each other as frequently. That said, apparently absence made their hearts grow stronger, because after a few drinks one of them finally asked the other out. It wasn’t hard for her to like Maggie, who she had watched pacing crime scenes like a lionesse pacing for the kill. 

As Alex strips off her gloves and apron, she can’t help returning to last night. Sure, they’d been dating for a while and friends for much longer, but on such staggered work schedules it was hard to get their relationship to progress. 

But last night, it progressed rather beautifully. 

The only problem was her phone waking her up at 4am. She hadn’t had time to contact Maggie since she left her in bed, and now she isn’t sure whether to bring it up here in the lab which has an atmosphere of work. 

“Since you’re the lead on this case now, I’ve got some more surprises for you.”

Maggie grins, and Alex’s stomach clenches as she reaches up to pluck the goggles from her head. “I love surprises.” 

They exchange: Alex takes the goggles and Maggie gets handed an envelope of crime scene photographs, still fresh from the printer. The detective carefully slides them out of the envelope, and follows Alex as they head out of the lab. 

They sift through each photograph together, passing them back and forth as they stroll down through the labs. They pass techs running tests to determine blunt force trauma, the ones sorting through to provide more concrete analysis that they can work off. She does a good job of behaving herself, shuffling all the photographs back in the envelope and not lingering on Maggie’s profile too long. 

They pause to watch her assistant, Nia, finishing a toxicology report for another case. She gives them a wave and a smirk through the glass. 

“Any early theories on our dead businessman?”

Alex thinks of the fleshy mess that was once the businessman's face, his body as cold as her slab. “Blunt force trauma. Very blunt. Very traumatised.”

Maggie grimaces at the last picture, shuffling it into the envelope and handing it back over. “So I see.”

As soon as they’re safely in her office, Alex shuts the door, spins the detective towards her and kisses her firmly, as if she wants no other doubts, excuses or interludes. 

She pulls back. “Hey.”

Maggie seems pleased, relaxing against her. “Hey.”

“Sorry for leaving this morning.”

“You had a good excuse,” Maggie replies, nodding back towards the direction of the morgue.

Alex throws the envelope of photographs on her blue couch behind Maggie, and pulls her closer in her arms. “Yeah but I’d have liked to have stayed.” 

As they kiss again, Alex sighs happily. She loves her work, loves being a medical examiner and helping solve cases, but the fog of last night descends and leaves her reeling. “Can’t we just stay here in this office, forever?”

“I don’t know about forever but…” Maggie glances at a clock on the wall, then wriggles out of Alex’s arms. “Maybe we could settle for the lunch break...”

Alex watches her saunter towards a window in her office, closing the blinds incrementally. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

The blinds tilt deeper, barely any visibility now, but Maggie is suspending them, waiting for the final confirmation. 

“I don’t have to go out,” Alex says, slipping off her white coat and draping it over the couch. “One of my lab rats can bring me something later.”

“Okay…” 

The metal blinds clink shut. Maggie glides over and doesn’t stop until their pressed together. 

Alex grins. “So we could pick up where we left off.”

Maggie pretends to think about it. “As it happens, I think that’s a great idea.”

It won’t be forever, but as Alex gets pushed down onto the plush blue couch, she’s happy for what she can get-** **  
** **

~

They’d been at this forever, going at each other.

She blocks a punch. A foot kicks out towards her head. She grabs for the ankle, twists, her opponent loses their footing and stumbles away. 

She shakes her head in disapproval. “Again.”

Her opponent jumps from toe to toe, their shoulders swaying like a cobra. Except Agent Danvers craves the bite as the cobra lunges forward. A jab, another, one blunt against her sternum and knocking the air out of her lungs. She manages a clumsy shove, her opponent backtracking at the force. 

She nods, trying to catch her breath. “Better. Now faster.”

They exchange high kicks, roundhouse kicks. A spinning, aerial style of combat that soon has them both sweating. Her opponent calls for pause and strips off their DEO shirt, reducing her to her sports bra. Agent Danvers can see how the sweat shimmers off her defined abdomen and she reaches for water just for something to swallow. 

Then they go again. 

She’d been tasked with training her successor, someone to replace her as she climbed further up the ranks herself. J’onn had said it was a _ see one, do one, teach one _ exercise, a concept she was familiar with in medical school. That meant searching, observing, choosing and training her successor. 

There had a been a few men and women that she’d scouted at military and police academies, the FBI, political intelligence groups. J’onn’s contacts in other agencies give her pick of their respective litters, but no one caught her eye.

It was only when she wasn’t actively looking, while she was running a surveillance mission, that she met a woman taking night classes in criminal law. As Agent Danvers stalked a suspect around a college campus for ten nights, she managed to keep running into this woman. At the all night coffee shop on the corner, coming through the campus corridors, sitting beside her on the campus bus. 

And once, she had stood at the door of the woman’s class, listening to her give a presentation, listening to how passionate she was about the subject she was learning. 

They’d built a rapport, and when Agent Danvers finally carried out an arrest and revealed the reason she had been sulking around the campus at night, she’d gone a step further and offered the woman a chance to join her agency. Granted, there was some preliminary training to do, physicals to pass, tests of mental and psychological strength. If the background checks passed, the woman could join the DEO as Agent Danvers’ apprentice, of sorts. 

The woman took the offer- 

Agent Danvers ducks an oncoming blow. She gets a knee to her chin as a punishment for not thinking quickly enough. She careens backwards, her jaw clicking. 

-the woman easily passed. 

Finding her footing, she stares down her opponent, circling. “Better. Again.”

As they tire, they return to a jumpy boxing style. Right hooks, uppercuts, caging each other in. Smacking of skin against skin. And as their energy depletes further they change to a choppier style, striking any time they can. 

She swipes at her opponent’s throat, just catching under her jaw. Her opponent knows the mistake immediately. 

“Dan-”

Agent Danvers waves her hand dismissively. “Not good enough. I could have-”

“Claws.” Her opponent moves for a swallow of water. “A Knife. I got it.”

“You don’t,” Agent Danvers snaps, “Again.” 

Maggie Sawyer had been a college drop out. When her aunt had gotten sick, she became her primary carer and had taken up double shifts to pay for medication. When she met Agent Danvers, she was a city cop, but since she had no degree, she wanted to get some qualifications to further her career, hence the night classes. 

Maggie’s dedication and loyalty immediately drew Alex in. Upstanding, intelligent, empathetic. She was naive enough to believe in justice for all and world-weary enough to be alert for danger everywhere. She was also in good shape, which meant that the physical wouldn’t be too hard to train for-

The pair parry, trading blows, until they practically shove each other apart. Both of them are breathing hard, gasping for breath, sweat shining in the overhead lights. 

“Again,” Agent Danvers growls, “Come at me harder.” 

-therein lies the problem. Maggie Sawyer is in _ fantastic _ shape. 

Training Maggie is dangerous, dizzying. It’s like walking a tightrope and losing her balance, except the captive audience in the circus tent were her colleagues. She has overheard more than one snide comment about how quick her selection of Maggie had been since her break up with Catherine. 

Perhaps they had been right all along. Maggie had even challenged her on this, which she had firmly denied-

Maggie grabs her wrist from the air, gripping, turning. She tries to counter, and they end up grappling. 

\- and the problem is, Maggie was right. Her colleagues were right. 

Unable to offset each other’s balance, they crumble altogether, hitting the mats hard. They wrestle with weakened, energy-starved muscles, sweaty hands failing to gain any real friction. Finally, she gains ground and kneels above Maggie, pinning her down by the shoulders. 

And despite all Alex has taught her, Maggie goes lax underneath her hold. She doesn’t push, fight, hassle her way out from under Alex’s weight. She simply relaxes, chest heaving, tension leaving her. She stares at Alex’s lips. 

And Alex can barely catch her own breath - logic deserts her. 

She leans down and kisses Maggie, sharp and desperate, enjoying the wet heat of them for just a single second. Then she flings herself up and away. 

“We’re finished for today.”

She hears a huff of a hollow laugh behind her, then Maggie getting to her feet. “Whatever.”

Alex begins unwrapping her hands, guilt heavy on her shoulders. “Maggie-”

“I hate this,” Maggie spits, “Why do you keep doing this?”

She turns at the vitriol, seeing the pain, the confusion in her partner’s eyes. She lets her wraps hang loosely from her right hand, trying to formulate an answer that won’t sound cheap. But Maggie jumps back at her before she can. 

“I don’t know what you’re afraid of. I’m not some dumb, young naive girl.”

“You’re my-” Alex glances at the closed entrance, at the blacked out observation window. She realises that if anyone were watching them train, they will have caught the kiss. “You’re still being trained by me.”

“I’m older than you!”

(Her lips burn with that kiss.)

“It doesn’t matter, Maggie, I’m in a position of responsibility-”

“So act responsible.” 

And she storms off, thumping down the steps, tapping at the wall mount and exiting the room. Alex stands in the middle of the training room, the frenetic energy of their fighting, their kiss, sparking all around her. 

She pursues. 

She catches up with Maggie halfway to the locker room, where she bumps into J’onn. 

“Agent Sawyer.”

He receives a bruque “Sir” in response. He isn’t bewildered by the brush off, fixing Alex with unimpressed eyes. She wonders how much he can see in his mind, in Maggie’s mind - in _ her _ mind. 

“I’ll fix it,” she promises, not looking away from the floor. 

The air filtration is of the highest standard, considering the various alien substances that agents can come back from missions slathered in. Soaked in sweat, the clean air makes Alex uneasy, repulsed at her state. At the state of _this_.

Maggie is rummaging around in her designated locker, obscuring Alex’s view of her face. She clears her throat. “I wanted to apologise for acting inappropriately.”

“Today or when we met?” Maggie throws out a half-full bottle of shower gal, which knocks against the wooden benches running along between the lockers and chatters onto the floor. Shampoo follows, its fate the same. “I thought, at last, I’d found a woman I have a real, genuine connection with.”

The sarcasm is stark in the acoustics of the locker room. “Maggie.”

“But no, I get it.” Maggie slams her locker closed, the bang echoing around and making Alex flinch as she is fixed with a cool stare. “You don’t want me.”

Alex pulls the limp wrap tighter around her hand, feeling the pulse of trapped blood, then releases, unravelling it. “That’s not true.”

“Oh, you’re attracted to me.” Maggie looks her up and down as she scoops the shampoo and shower gel from the floor. “That much is obvious.”

Alex ducks her chin, embarrassed as Maggie turns on her heel and goes for the spacious linen cupboard at the end of the room

“It isn’t true, what you’re saying,” she protests, following. 

“About?”

“About me.”

Flat, flint eyes meet her only briefly. Then Maggie begins a game of chicken, stripping off her shirt to reveal a sweat-slicked abdomen, tight black sports bra. The tease of a navel above her DEO-issues training wear.

“You know, I heard in a college English class, before I dropped out, that the only way to get rid of temptation is to give into it.” Maggie hooks her thumbs below the waistband of the leggings and peels them down. Alex follows them as they traverse hips, thighs, knees, shins, feet. Follows the rippling muscles. “That a philosophy you’re peddling, Danvers?”

Eventually averting her gaze, Alex focuses on the tiled flooring, the dark walls, the empty showers lined in a row in front of her. Dizzying, like that tightrope she insists on walking. 

“It isn’t true, what you just said about wanting you,” she says. 

Maggie hooks her towel on the ledge at the shower’s entrance. Then she pulls away the curtain, the rungs shrieking against the metal bar. She pauses, turns, eyes suddenly full of emotion. 

“Just admit it,” she whispers.

Alex’s heart lurches. “Maggie…”

“Just once. Please.”

The plea is potent; makes her feel as if she has inhaled paint thinner, titles, roles, common sense stripped away. 

She feels the tightrope wobble, rope burning against the soles of her feet. The drum roll, the crowds intake of breath. She is going to fall- 

Her throat constricts, the wrap slithering away from her wrist and rustling against the floor. And then - 

“I want you.”

She falls. 

Once said, it unleashes a Pandora’s box of the things she has been tempted by, been tempted to do. She wanders forward backing Maggie into the shower stall. Unprompted, Maggie catches the sides of her shirt and pulls them together. 

Maggie had asked for once, but she says it again, “I want you.”

And again, pressing her against the tiles - 

“I want you.”

But not a fourth time, as their lips crash together. 

Even amidst their sighs echoing around the shower stall, Alex can hear the whispers of her colleagues saying it was too soon after Catherine to go chasing after a new woman. Yet Maggie is nothing like Catherine, Jessica, Amy: any of the women she’d dated. 

She presses Maggie against the navy tiles, all kinds of notions tumbling out of that Pandora’s box. A lack of shame, the need to possess, to claim this woman as her own. 

Running her hands hungrily over Maggie’s curves, she feels all of the dried sweat and grime from their training session, grips at her hips, her spine, her ribs, anything to make Maggie moan into her mouth and press closer. 

“I want you,” she murmurs, nuzzling at the shell of Maggie’s ear, tugging at the underwear around her hips and pushing down to mid-thigh, baring her just enough. 

Her fingers tangle up into sweat-dampened hair, pulling it from its ponytail. She peels off the sports bra, tastes the exertion of their fighting on her skin. And when she slips her hands between her partner’s thighs, thinks of them on the mat. That moment when Maggie went lax beneath her, let her kiss her, _ wanted her _ to kiss her. 

“You’re wet,” she murmurs, kissing along Maggie’s pulse, following the map of her carotid to nip at her ear. The only response she gets is a hand clasping at her wrist, encouraging her with a grip. She sets her forehead to Maggie’s, that flat darkness in her eyes not just from anger but now from lust. 

They’ve sparred so much, been so physical, that this intimacy isn’t entirely new. But not having to restrain herself, hold back, is thrilling. Feeling the wet heat of Maggie against her fingertips, sliding through, slipping into her, is electrifying. Every twitch; how Maggie widens her stance, moans against Alex’s jaw, every shudder is incredible. 

In her rapture, Maggie blindly reaches out to grip the stainless steel shower dials, nudging it on and spraying them with tepid water. Alex gasps, presses her fingers deeper, happy to get drenched as she continues fucking this woman - 

Their activities echo around the stall. They echo, and echo - 

~

She needs a shower. Badly. But there are boxes still left unticked. 

A gentle hand at her elbow guides her through the madness of the press room, her studs slicking with every step. Sweat sticks in every crevice of her body, and she knows she must be shining still under the floodlights of the media area. 

Through the madness she sees a cluster of kids that animate at the sight of her. With a smile at the steward, she goes towards them. There are four, of varying ages. The smallest thrusts a jersey towards her with her name and number on it. 

_ Danvers. _

_ 10\. _

She takes in their joy-filled expressions, knowing that they don’t care about the noise, the sweat, the heaving press room. They are here for her, their VIP tags swinging wildly around their necks. 

“Did you guys enjoy the game?” she asks, taking a sharpie that the steward produces.

The quartet all nod so fast she thinks their heads will roll right off. 

The one that handed her the jersey bounces with excitement.“Your goal was so cool!”

“Yeah?”

Honestly, she doesn’t remember it. She remembers chances more than anything; the misses, the saves, the one that sailed straight over the bar and earned her a glare from teammate Sara Lance. But these four kids mimic her celebration, all aiming finger-guns at her the same way she aims them into the camera lens, and that’s enough of a triumph for her.

Through the media jungle, cutting through the haze of a dozen voices, she hears her favourite sound. Albeit, in a different language. She looks up and spots her sports journalist girlfriend, chattering in Spanish with two other broadcasters. She’d been unsure about being asked to do punditry for a foreign network, joking about how she wasn’t sure she could remain unbiased in her commentary when her girlfriend was on the pitch. 

She gives back the jersey, and a second kid hands her a ball. Her pen squeaks across a surface untouched by grass or clay. Still, with the pen poised on the white and black ball, she gets distracted by how Maggie’s mouth curves and curls around the words of another language, nasal tone carrying across the chaotic din of the press room. 

“Hey Alex!” She blinks and looks down at one of the children, shy but smiling, who squeaks, “Stop getting distracted by your girlfriend!”

She bounces the ball of her knee and the kid catches it. She grins. “Keep playing, no matter what. I want that ball to get dirty, got it?”

The quartet nod frantically, and she gives them one last wink before the steward is guiding her away from them. Her mission at this World Cup is to score, to win, but her mission in her career is to encourage as many young girls to keep playing soccer. 

After all, she wanted to quit when her dad died. If she did, she wouldn’t be in this press room in Paris. 

She remembers those summer mornings at practice, grey and bleak. She wasn’t scoring, wasn’t concentrating, eventually got parked on the bench. Her coach, J’onn Jones, talked her into doing kick-abouts on a Saturday morning, just the two of them, and giving her the choice to leave before the real team practice began. 

It developed into morning therapy. He got her to talk and cry and most importantly to score again. She drilled hard after that, and when the offers came in a few years later for a scholarship, she made a conscious choice to go out of the state for college with his guidance. 

Of course, with that came a whole slate of revelations: maybe the most important of these came when she was lying in bed with the goalkeeper from her college team. She stared up at a peeling movie poster, wondering what other revelations she would discover about herself. 

Both at a domestic and international level, she had strived to achieve success. But none came close to the success of having Maggie Sawyer as her girlfriend. 

As she slithers herself through the gaps between camera men, interns tapping on tablets, stewards, players and journalists, she hears the low laugh that Maggie makes, presumably at a jibe made by another pundit. 

She had seen Maggie around in press rooms like these, but it was Kara who had formally introduced them. That same sister waves at her from over a sea of cameras and commentators as if she were drowning and only Alex could save her. She points her steward in Kara’s direction, and after shuffling, finally gets through. 

“Well done!” Kara says, hugging her without prompt.

Alex wrinkles her nose, reminded of the sweat layering her entire body. “We on yet?”

Kara glances at the camera, then shakes her head. 

The Danvers sisters interviews had become a novelty, only becoming more infamous and popular as both of their respective careers took off. 

Kara plays with the bottom of her wireless CatCo microphone. “You know I’m gonna have to ask about these rumours.”

Alex pinches at her own waist, shrugging. “If you don’t, someone else will.”

Kara postpones her next question in order to wave at James, who is taking pictures of USWNT Coach Marsdin as she poses with fans. Then, “They aren’t true, are they?”

“No.” Alex frowns at her sister’s unconvinced expression. “God, _ no _they’re not.”

“Just foreign press trying to get to you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Kara plays with the navy sponge of the CatCo microphone, then nods towards Maggie, still talking in front of the camera. “I think you’ve gotta brainstorm a big gesture to prove that to her.”

“Big gestures are only my thing on the pitch.”

She believes that’s the truth. Her big gestures are her goals, her celebrations. Getting her name on the scoreboard, lifting league trophies at home, firing her national team towards global glory. 

But really, Alex Danvers is a woman of small gestures, of small pleasures. She can dream of lifting the World Cup at the end of this tournament, but she isn’t sure it would come close to having Maggie padding around her apartment wearing only a pair of her boxers and her domestic team jersey-

“Alex?” She looks at her sister, whose demeanour is ready to interview. “Ready?”

Despite the prior warning, Alex still stumbles over the key questions. She and Maggie were at odds because of a media whip up about rumours that Alex had been secretly sleeping with one of the Canadian team. Cameron Chase is her teammate at National City Thunder, and somehow a friendly picture between them as they ran into each other in a Parisian hotel during the group stages had escalated online. 

Maggie had said she believes her that there was no cheating, but Alex’s own insecurity and paranoia had spiralled and they had a string of terrible rows. They still were not really on speaking terms. Before the match, her messages had been absent of the traditional _ Good luck! _ she usually received. 

Big gesture. How could she show the world that she belonged only to Maggie? 

She barely hears Kara telling her they’ve finished recording before she is gravitating through the thicket of sports reports towards her girlfriend. 

Maggie is still talking, not catching the looks of surprise on her colleagues’ faces as Alex makes her way over. Finally, Maggie sees they aren’t focused on what she is saying, and looks past the camera to her girlfriend. 

Alex is vaguely aware of the camera swinging towards her as she steps into its frame. Maybe she intended to pounce the minute the red light went out, but the red light is still on as she stops just a few inches from her girlfriend. 

One of the other commentators says something in Spanish, she hears _ novia _ and faintly recognises its meaning, but she’s focused on her girlfriend’s stormy eyes. 

“Remember when we got together, and you used that cheesy line on me?” she says.

Maggie nervously glances at her colleagues, the camera. She grips her _ Fútbol Mundial _microphone. “Sí - uh - yeah, what about it?”

“That we should be who we are,” she says, chancing a step forward, clasping Maggie’s elbow, as if that’s a safe position. “We should kiss the girls that we wanna kiss.”

“Yeah?”

Alex leans closer, making sure her statement is audible to Maggie and her colleagues. “And I _ only _ wanna kiss you.”

She just catches the moment Maggie registers her meaning before she leans in to kiss her. She hears Maggie’s colleagues reacting around them, their wondrous surprise. She imagines the bluster of tweets, questions, reports and articles about this moment. The firm statement she is making. Silencing critics, putting rumours to bed, rather than her Thunder teammate. 

But all she really cares about is Maggie’s forgiveness, Maggie kissing her back. 

She leans away, sees the amusement in her girlfriend’s eyes. “I thought you were saving the celebrations for winning the World Cup?”

Alex grins, dipping her backwards, Maggie’s colleagues gasping and giggling. Around them, they’ve drawn some attention, cameras flash, voices are raising questions in various languages. 

“I’m already a winner,” she replies, surging in for a second kiss - 

~

Surging back to life, Maggie rips off her headset and gasps at the air. 

Her own headset loose in her hand, Alex watches her girlfriend come back to the surface, to full consciousness. Maggie twists her wrist and gapes at her watch. 

“47 minutes? That’s all?”

Not even an hour, all that, and... “That’s all.”

Maggie jangles her heatset. “That can’t be right.” 

“It is.” Alex’s voice is tight, unhinged, giddy at the unreality. 

She watches her girlfriend scramble to disengage and unattach all the equipment from her and then dart over, reaching for any part of Alex she can. “I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes with you.”

“And I want more,” Alex says, pressing their foreheads together and pushing her own headset off to the side. “I want so much more.”

Maggie tips her backwards onto the floor of the room and Alex doesn’t fight her. It’s erotic, disregarding the time and place. Alex fumbles for the datapad by the headsets, fiddling out of the corner of her eye as Maggie strips off her own shirt and begins kissing at her neck. She adjusts a dial and the room is bathed in a red light as they fall into a familiar ritual. 

Their physical boundaries unthread like loose ribbon, just as their emotional boundaries had unravelled long ago. Before Maggie, Alex wasn’t sure she believed in souls, especially after her dad died. He was gone and she never felt like she could have moved on to an afterlife. But with Maggie, something had been awakened inside. 

Beyond sexuality; the primal, the carnal, the desire. Beyond craving for the tongue along her throat and fingers inside her. Beyond begging for release, for the hours spent learning to please a woman, rolling around in her sheets. 

Beyond the emotional; tender, care, need. The way Maggie held her when she cried, didn’t tell her she was weak for needing affection, supported her with difficult days at work, came to understand the dynamic of her mother, her sister, J’onn. 

Beyond the social; the friend, the colleague, the partner. Beyond pushing her to improve in her work, to be smarter, more empathetic. Beyond having someone to share interests with, music, dates. Beyond someone she wanted to spend time with. 

Beyond the already nuanced, complex human experience, beyond anything she can describe with words. There is something about when their eyes meet, when Maggie is inside her vulnerable and wanting like this, when she holds that eye contact and trusts her lover to see the pleasure, see how _ she _ reacts to it. Allowing her hips to push up and fall into the rhythm dictated by Maggie’s fingers. 

There is something more than the base instinct driving her closer to the edge. More than breathing _ I’m gonna come _, than Maggie pressing deeper, than those obscene, lewd sounds. More than Maggie unashamedly grinding off on her thigh and hipbones to chase her own end. 

This is the experience of two people melding into one across endless lifetimes. Her orgasm is coaxed from her like a final breath, connecting her to those other worlds, and she gives it up easily, spreading her knees wider to let Maggie between them, pulling her down closer.

And afterwards, naked, as she changes the room’s colour to a cool blue, she feels something - _ something- _that she supposes could make her believe she has a soul, and that it is tied to the woman lying entwined with her. 

“Soothing,” she murmurs, brushing her lips over Maggie’s shoulder. 

“Do you think this is how the kids in Narnia felt when they got out of the wardrobe?” Maggie asks, pressing her lips to Alex’s breast. 

“Uh…” Alex laughs, delirious at the implications and turning onto her side. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“They lived years and years in there and then…” Maggie traces her fingertips down Alex’s spine, letting the thought drift for a moment. “Came back out as if no time has passed.”

Alex closes her eyes, blue haze lifting her back to those worlds. She drifts here, there and to the present again. They lie there for some time, listening to the rumbling belly of the DEO, until finally they decide they need to leave the sanctuary they have created. 

They help each other dress and she kisses Maggie goodbye, and then spends her afternoon typing furiously, sifting case files and keeping a document open. She deletes everything she had and starts her vows afresh. She sets the hourglass on the end of her desk, spinning it constantly throughout the day, never letting the sand settle for too long.

The next morning, J’onn and Kara as her witness, she gives it another go. She sees the verdict on their faces before she even asks. 

“How’s that?”

Kara bounces on her toes, giving her two thumbs up. J’onn takes a deep breath, pride etched into his smile. 

“I think you’ve got it,” he says.

Two months later, she gets the chance to share those words in front of her friends and family. Staring into eyes she has seen in a dozen worlds and now believed she would see in a dozen more. 

And later, sharing their first dance, she smiles against the shell of her wife’s ear. She feels victorious at finally putting her feelings into words, but has one more to share before she’s done - 

“Soulmates...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you have enjoyed :) I hope it won't be so long, next time.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed, please let me know :)


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